Untitled (Flowers)

After returning to India from his studies in Paris in the mid-1960s, Jogen Chowdhury found work as a textile designer in Madras, and then moved to Delhi in 1972. During his time there, the artist developed what has come to be known as his signature style. His highly-detailed works on paper are executed in ink and pastel, their figures and objects set against inky black backgrounds. The emphasis was on strong, sinuous lines, and Chowdhury used a distinctive crosshatching technique within these lines to achieve tonal variations, volume, texture and movement. The artist’s remarkable draftsmanship reflects his work with textiles, where repetition, patterning and direction were paramount.

In the present lot, Chowdhury uses this technique to portray a flowering plant in a vase decorated with a similar floral motif. Much like his human and animal figures, here each flower's fleshy stalks and disproportionate petals are carefully constructed from fine crosshatched lines, and appear to heave and sag like shapeshifting amoebae. This unique interpretation of form is “simplified, as if through x-ray vision: attenuated, exaggerated, fragmented, reconfigured and rephrased, thus intensifying its visual and conceptual expression” (K. Singh, India Modern: Narratives from 20th Century Indian Art, New Delhi, 2015, p. 129).