Gallery Espace presents the works of Ishita Chakraborty and Sharad Sonkusale, two young artists who explore the world of nuance between black and white.

Chakraborty, is a native of West Bengal and currently lives in Zurich, where she is pursuing an MFA program at the Zurich University of the Arts. Her art arises from her feelings of cultural alienation and her struggle with the Eurocentric self-image of the society around her. Her assiduous hand-scratched drawings – a process she likens to ‘wounds’ – transform their collected memories of home and exile, of floorplans, folk-tales, reports and the writings of diaspora poets. They are also inspired by maps, landscapes and transient geographies or shared historiographies crossing Asia and Europe.

Sonkusale’s monochromatic works on canvas, overlaid with small squares of rice paper, reenact the vibrations of music, and are a visual transposition of ‘sur’ and ‘taal’ in the ragas of Hindustani music that he is deeply interested in and inspired by Sharad’s canvases begin with the dot, a point of focused attention, which aggregate to form dabs, dashes and lines that travel horizontally and vertically, and sometimes diagonally across the visual plane, creating abstract patterns and grey tones, flecked sometimes with gold. The effect is that of an emotional landscape, a reflection of the artist’s own interiority, perhaps, but also one that invites viewers to engage with the translucent surface and make of it what he will.

To view the online exhibition, click here.