Artists Zaam Arif and Shrimanti Saha represent an exciting cohort of emerging talent from the region, with their striking painterly practices that lay emphasis on resolving expression through the traditional medium of oil painting. Both artists use narrative emplotment as a stylistic visual device, but to different ends.
Arif’s existential milieus prioritize the philosophical integrity of his subjects by focusing on their interiority; as his protagonists attend to questions on the meaning of life, they appear foregrounded and self-absorbed in a surrealistic world conjoined by overpowering elemental forces such as the sea alongside a host of personal effects that suggest a limited, contrasting access to certainty and knowledge. Saha’s world-building develops from abroad range of inspirations, from natural almanacs, Indo-Persian miniatures and European art history to graphic novels, literary criticism and science fiction, and explores varying conditions of vibrancy and rupture in the current geological age, through an iterative vocabulary of visceral characters, fragmented architecture and organic forms.
