Jogen Chowdhury

Jogen Chowdhury
Jogen Chowdhury at Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata
Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha)
Incumbent
Assumed office 3rd April 2014
Constituency	West Bengal
Personal details
Born	(1939-02-16)16 February 1939 Daharpara Village, Faridpur, East Bengal
Political party	All India Trinamool Congress
Occupation	painter
Website	http://www.jogenchowdhury.net/

Jogen Chowdhury (born 16 February 1939) is an eminent Indian painter and considered an important painter of 21st century India. He lives and works in Santiniketan. He graduated from the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata and subsequently at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 1967. He has immense contribution in inspiring young artists of India. Jogen Chowdhury had developed his individual style after his return from Paris. His most famous paintings are in ink, water colour and pastel. He has painted in oil medium as well.

Lines and its tactile characteristic to enhance colours is an important material in Indian Art for ages. Jogen Chowdhury himself is a master of lines and he has mastered to make the curves depict the character of his figures. By careful distortion of the form he imparts the air of caricature in his figures, figures of men and women. The figure is always the most important and conveys all the artist has to express. Colour, he uses though, is to provide matter into the form. In a significant way. R. Siva Kumar, the reputed art historian, has lucidly described Jogen's works in the following excerpt:"The pulse and rhythm of Jogen Chowdhury’s art comes from a filial affinity to nature and milieu. In Chowdhury’s more recent works the sensory experiences of cloth, bolsters, sofas and the human body are cross-projected to produce an uncanny world of tran-substantiated tumescence and flaccidness. Mnemic displacements and personal associations add to the symbolic ambivalence of his motifs, making his images come closer to inexplicable experiences than to explicit signs. In the postures of some figures we feel an animal sentience, in the ripe anatomy of others we savour a fruity succulence. The figures are wrought by a combination of decorative wilfulness and expressive distortion and are imbued with an effusive sensuality. Chowdhury’s art is rich in suggestions; it is to be apprehended without bracketing our fund of knowledge, experience or memories, but also cannot be narrativised without trivialising it, without depleting its sensory particularities."

Jogen was born in Daharpara Village, a village in the Faridpur district of Bangladesh in 1939. His father Pramatha Nath Chowdhury was a Brahmin zamindar. Jogen received the interest on art from his parents as both his parents were artists. Pramatha Nath was interested in Hindu mythological incidents and characters. He had painted several mythological scenes from the village theatres. He had also sculpted various Hindu deities. Jogen's mother was an expert in Alpana drawings.