Ranadip Mukherjee with painting
His picture of Benares looks like a manuscript of a poem. It is amazing to see the application of colours there. Ranadip Mukherjee is a name that has been working for the past 33 years in the field of contemporary art in India. He had his first solo exhibition at Kolkata's Academy of Fine Arts in 1991 and his second solo show at Kolkata's prestigious auditorium in Tata Centre the following year. And in 1993, his first one-man show in Mumbai in the Jahangir Art Gallery.
Tata Steel commissioned the Artist to paint the glorious 100-year history of steel making, which Sir Ratan Tata himself opened the show in Jamshedpur on 3rd March 2011. Ranadip shifted his studio from Kolkata to Mumbai permanently in 2002.
Ranadip has been working on the Benares Series since 2009. Among the early works on Benares, we see a painting with a collection of many small incidents. But if we look at the pictures of Benares after that or today, it seems like a romanticism emerging from the depths of the artist's mind. His works are based on free and expressive brushwork, his colours are poetic, rich and sensuous, his compositions are sometimes fluid, dynamic and adventurous. His Benaras works are based on the attitude of the artist's intellectual orientation. In this series, sometimes the water of the river is red, and there are many unknown forms floating in it-sometimes half-round or triangular and sometimes something else.
There the colour of the sky is sometimes darkish mauve or yellowish or something else. A quiet world of the artist's independent mind is caught in his pictures. The illusion of this colour and arrangement of forms is like a fairy tale of the artist's mind, which comes back again and again in his paintings. In the words of the artist, "Every single corner of Benares is my own country. Whom I know well. So I do feel the urge from inside my heart to draw a picture about the ancient city. The Benaras Series is my emotional experience rather than physical reality."
