INTRODUCTION

The shocking and the elegant come together in the subtly – aesthetically – provocative paintings of Abir Karmakar. In their spatial construction, mannerist perspective and their obsessive attention to detail, they echo the tradition of oil painting, the work of the old masters. Karmakar's handling – his use of highlights, the nuances of his painterly touch, his mastery of the interplay of light and shadow – makes it clear that he wants us to appreciate his picture as a painting, as fine art.

Karmakar's self-portraits clearly occupy – besides their opulent interiors – a psychic or inner space. The clothed and naked figures in his paintings are mirror images of each other, whatever the differences in their expressions and postures. Androgynous narcissism is an ironical way of establishing a loving relationship with oneself – of intercourse between the masculine and feminine sides of one's psyche. Karmakar's paintings, his complex stories, continue to evoke an inward-looking world replete with imagined situations and layers of psychosomatic content.

Born 1977 in Siliguri, India
Bachelor of Visual Arts in Painting, Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta
MA in Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda
Lives in Baroda