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Prokash Karmakar

  /    /  Prokash Karmakar

Oil on canvas
21 x 29 inches

Prokash Karmakar

Born in 1933 in Kolkata, Prokash Karmakar was a preeminent Indian artist. He learned painting from his artist-teacher father, Prahlad Karmakar, but unfortunately, had to abandon his studies at the Government College of
Arts and Crafts, Kolkata for financial reasons.

Karmakar spent three formative years as a young painter in Paris on a French Government Scholarship. This led to a unique style – an interesting synthesis of the post-impressionist school with the Kalighat pat tradition of Kolkata – which he employs with great lyricism to express the sensuous beauty of rural Bengal. His style is a rich and original aesthetic fusion from Eastern and Western art while retaining the authentic stamp of his individuality.

Like many of his contemporaries, his works are reminiscent of the tumultuous socio-political turmoil of the forties, yet there is a difference in the way he expressed these travails. There is a tendency to metamorphose the nightmares into objects of fantasy, to escape the real into the surreal and dwell in complete physical abandon. His paintings radiate a calm, poetic exuberance and then at other times, reflect the upheavals and turmoil of modern life. His female objects as well as his lavish landscapes are full-bodied and luscious, with an ethereal quality. The artist also ‘tries to liberate’ what he sees in a bird, a horse and more often, in figures.

Influenced by the works of Picasso and the classic impressionists, Karmarkar`s works reflect the degenerating society and the confusion that prevails in India today. He was also fascinated by the large-scale migration of people to Kolkata and the city’s inability to cope up with this human diaspora. In this context, he painted the refugees representing the marginalized sections of society, where the protagonists inhabit a morbid and unreachable space entrenched in human suffering.

Prokash Karmakar is considered a revolutionary because he did not want his paintings to be imprisoned within four walls. So throughout his career he exhibited on street corners. In 1956, he held a street exhibition, the first in
the city, hanging his works along a corner.

The Founder Member of Society of Contemporary Artist, Kolkata, 1961 and that of the Calcutta Painters group, he has received more than ten prestigious awards between 1957 and 1999, including the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award in 1968 and the Abanindra Puraskar Award in 1999.Prakash Karmarkar passed away on 25th February 2014.

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