Artist Shipra Bhattacharya brings five decades of her work to Chennai’s Lalit Kala Akademi

“In my early years, I tried to bring into my work the places where I lived, Kolkata and its surroundings, social situations and human character. There was a great deal of struggle during that period, and I tried to represent that,” she says. “Where I live, where I travel, what I see around me, these are what inspire me. It comes from my own way of seeing and understanding things. If a social situation triggers something within me, it finds its way into my work.”

Desire, over decades

Among the clearest threads running through the exhibition is Desire. The title first appears here in paintings from 1980 and resurfaces throughout 1993, 1998, 2002, 2018, 2019 and finally 2026. It travels across media too, from pen and ink and oil on canvas to acrylic, oil and bronze.

Over the years, Shipra’s women have inhabited spaces between the domestic and the public, reality and imagination, their bodies sometimes becoming surfaces upon which other worlds can unfold. Her work has been associated particularly with women’s interior lives, longing, sexuality and the freedom of imagination.

But Shipra is wary of pinning a single interpretation to any of them. “Painting is avyakta, something that cannot entirely be expressed in words,” she says, translating a Bengali idea of that which remains unspoken or unexpressed. She explains, “I may have approached it with one thought or idea, but the person looking at it comes from another perspective. A single image can therefore have several meanings. That freedom must remain with the viewer.”

When the world enters the canvas

Taposhi, a 48-inch square acrylic-and-oil canvas from 2008, responds to the turbulence surrounding the Singur movement in West Bengal’s Hooghly district. The painting takes its name from Tapasi Malik, the young woman whose killing became one of the defining episodes of the agitation against land acquisition in West Bengal. Shipra remembers that period as one in which she was not merely observing political change from the distance of her studio.

“We wanted change, and we went there. Naturally, what I saw and experienced affected me deeply. I made several works from that period, but only one of them, Taposhi, is here,” she says. The painting gathers a disturbed world around its central figure: chameleon-like people, bodies and protesters carrying sticks.

The impulse to bear witness persists. By 2014, there are War and Stop War, both large canvases. Later come the monumental He, People and Floating of 2023, while Hanuman dates to 2025. The most recent works include He and another Desire, both from 2026.

Her practice has also increasingly moved beyond the flat surface. Bronze versions of Desire sit alongside fibreglass sculptures such as He I, She I, Flying Woman and Boat. Since the pandemic, Shipra says, her vocabulary has broadened further, with sculpture and the natural world assuming greater importance.

Nature, however, does not necessarily enter these works as sanctuary. “Nature is being destroyed and people are not paying attention to it, or to the repercussions of that destruction. That affects me deeply now,” she says.

One of her large sculptures, which could not make the journey to Chennai, depicts an enormous seated man, almost a thinker, and carries within it Shipra’s response to more recent events, including the 2024 RG Kar protests in Kolkata. She says the work is connected to frustration of possessing limited power to change what one is witnessing.

After nearly five decades of making images, she resists becoming their interpreter. A painting, once made, no longer belongs exclusively to the thought that produced it. The viewer brings another history to it, and therefore another meaning. “I don’t like talking about my paintings, and I find it difficult to do so. I cannot express myself as well through words, and I don’t think it is necessary,” she states.Then comes the simplest explanation of a career spent doing precisely the opposite of explaining: “If I could write it, why would I paint it?”

The exhibition is on view at Lalit Kala Akademi, Regional Centre, Greams Road, Chennai, from September 9 to 15, 2026, between 11am and 7pm. Entry is open and free for all.