Jayashree Chakravarty

Jayashree Chakravarty is a Kolkata based Indian visual artist, working with painted canvases, and large-scale installations of paper with mixed media.

Early life and education Jayashree Chakravarty was born in Khoai, Tripura and spent her childhood in Agartala, where she was first introduced to art. Her subjects of interest which have remained close to studies of nature came from her experiences of living in a small town. She studied at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan (1973–78) where she drew from the works of masters such as Nandalal Bose and Benodebihari Mukherjee, building a more nuanced vocabulary of her early interest in nature. Exposed to the cosmopolitanism of her immediate environment, surrounded by students and scholars from all over the world, Chakravarty was able to trace several similarities between Agartala and Santiniketan in terms of the ways in which small towns at the time were morphing into more urban spaces.

During the early 1980s, Jayashree moved to Vadodara, Gujarat and joined M.S. University for a PG Diploma in Painting. This change brought influences to her practice from post-Independence narrative art, especially as Vadodara became almost a transitional location between Agartala, Santiniketan, and Provence, France where the artist attended a two-year artist-residence programme between 1993-1995.

She later moved to Kolkata in 1982 to live in the Salt Lake area, and is currently still living there.

Work Jayashree’s practice grew exponentially during the entire 1970s, ‘80s and the early ‘90s, ranging from her early education to the more formative period of studying at art institutions. Encountering her work gives one the impression of an artist focused on the landscape but she ensures a layered complexity that evokes elements of the locale as well as a more expansive understanding of the landscape itself. Accumulating influences from her time in Agartala, Santiniketan, and Vadodara, her studies of the figure in relation to space became more acute than before. A Wired Ecology - a solo exhibition at Akar Prakar exhibition, Delhi (2019) Sightings: out of the wild - a solo exhibition at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida (2019) Unfoldings: The Route map of Experience at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida (2021) Feeling the Pulse (in the pandemic years) - a solo exhibition at Akar Prakar, New Delhi for Asia Week New York (2022)

Awards and recognition

First Indian artist to showcase at Paris’ Guimet Museum