In Lalit Kala Academy, a woman’s body can hold the city, and desire returns repeatedly, both as a title and as an idea. Elsewhere, the frame includes war, protests, environmental anxiety and a particular sense of helplessness while observing a society in crisis.
RetrospectiveShipra Bhattacharya, currently on display at the gallery, takes Shipra’s work from his student days in the late 1970s to the present day.
There is depth to her paintings: bodies, creatures, objects and fragments of social life dot the canvas, each seeming to contain worlds within worlds. At times, the teeming visual worlds are reminiscent of a modern Hieronymus Bosch, but seen through a distinctly feminine and modern lens, where the fantasy is imbued with desire, violence and the minutiae of life’s experience.
Shipra Bhattacharya | Photo credit: Special Arrangement
She is Shipra Bhattacharya | Photo Credit: Shipra Bhattacharya/Facebook
“It represents almost 50 years of my journey, from my student life to the artist I have become. The exhibition covers work from approximately 1979-80 to 2026,” says the artist. This is inevitably an incomplete autobiography. Many works from past decades now belong to private collections.
Shipra was born in Kolkata in 1954 and graduated from the University of Calcutta and later studied at the Government College of Arts and Crafts and the College of Fine Arts. Among her earliest works in the exhibition are “Landscape” from 1978 and 1979, followed by “Fisherman”, “Man, Calcutta” and two paintings called “Desire”, all from 1980.
“In my early years, I tried to bring into my works the places where I lived, Kolkata and its environs, social situations and human characters. There was a lot of struggle during that period and I tried to reflect that,” she says. “Where I live, where I travel, what I see around me is what inspires me. It comes from my own perspective and understanding of things. If a social situation triggers something in me, it is reflected in my work.”
Landscape by Shipra Bhattacharya | Photo credit: Special Arrangement
Desire for decades
Among the most prominent themes running through the exhibition is “Desire.” The title first appears here in the 1980 paintings and appears again in 1993, 1998, 2002, 2018, 2019 and finally in 2026. It also travels through media, from pen, ink and oil on canvas to acrylic, oil and bronze.
For many years, the women of Shipra inhabited the space between home and public, reality and imagination, their bodies sometimes becoming surfaces on which other worlds could unfold. Her work is particularly concerned with the inner lives of women, longing, sexuality and imaginative freedom.
But Shipra is wary of attaching a single interpretation to any of them. “Painting is avyakta“, that which cannot be fully expressed in words,” she says, translating the Bengali idea of what remains unspoken or unexpressed. She explains, “I may have approached it with one thought or idea, but the person looking at it is looking at it from a different perspective. So one image can have multiple meanings. That freedom should remain with the viewer.”
Taposhi Shipra Bhattacharya | Photo credit: Special Arrangement
When the world comes out on canvas
Taposhi, a 48-inch square acrylic and oil canvas, 2008, is a response to the turbulence surrounding the Singur movement in Hooghly district of West Bengal. The film takes its title from Tapasi Malik, a young woman whose murder was one of the defining episodes of the anti-land acquisition agitation in West Bengal. Shipra remembers this period as one in which she did not simply observe political changes from the distance of her studio.
“We wanted a change, so we went there. Naturally, what I saw and experienced affected me deeply. I have done several works from that period, but here is only one of them, Taposhi,” she says. The painting gathers a disturbing world around its central figure: chameleon-like people, bodies and stick-wielding protesters.
The urge to witness continues. By 2014, “War” and “Stop the War” appeared, both large canvases. Later appears the monumental “He, Men and Voyage” of 2023, and “Hanuman” dates from 2025. Recent works include Him and Another Desire, both from 2026.
Her practice is also increasingly moving beyond the flat surface. Bronze versions of Desire sit alongside fiberglass sculptures such as “He I,” “She I,” “Flying Woman,” and “Boat.” Since the pandemic, Shipra says, her vocabulary has expanded even further, with sculpture and the natural world taking on greater meaning.
Drawing by Shipra Bhattacharya | Photo credit: Special Arrangement
However, nature does not necessarily enter these works as a sanctuary. “Nature is being destroyed, and people are not paying attention to this or the consequences of this destruction. Now this touches me deeply,” she says.
One of her large sculptures, which failed to make it to Chennai, depicts a huge seated man, almost a thinker, and carries Shipra’s reaction to later events, including the RG Kar protests in Kolkata in 2024. She says the work comes with the frustration of limited ability to change what one observes.
Drawing by Shipra Bhattacharya | Photo credit: Special Arrangement
After nearly five decades of creating images, she refuses to become their interpreter. A picture, once created, no longer belongs solely to the thought that created it. The viewer brings into it a different story, and therefore a different meaning. “I don’t like to talk about my paintings and it’s hard for me to do so. I also can’t express myself in words, and I don’t think it’s necessary,” she states.
What follows is the simplest explanation of a career spent doing the exact opposite of the explanation: “If I could write it, why would I draw it?”
The exhibition will be on view at Lalit Kala Akademi, Regional Centre, Grims Road, Chennai from 9 to 15 September 2026 from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm. Entry is open and free to everyone.