Jayashree Chakravarty’s solo exhibition “If you will stay close to nature…” which will be held from 28 February to 5 April 2014. The exhibition marks Chakravarty’s comeback to Delhi; the Kolkata-based artist’s previous solo exhibition in Delhi was held in 2003. Chakravarty’s recent body of works has been inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s collection of ten letters, named Letters to a Young Poet. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from one of the letters, in which Rilke writes, “If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”
Nature as a subject for artistic expression and philosophical quests has been Chakravarty’s major preoccupation. Her body of 16 works, mostly generated in oil and acrylic , named as ‘Weeds’, ‘Aquatic plants’, ‘Shallow water’, ‘Local Habitat’, ‘Siddhasna’, ‘Moods of water’ etc, voice her concern about shifting environmental balance and mutating relationship between human and nature, provoked by soulless and aggressive urbanization.
Jayashree Chakravarty was born in 1956 in Khoai, Tripura. She did her BFA in Painting from Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, and did a Post Graduate Diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts of MS University of Baroda. She was an artist in residence at Aix en Provence between 1994 and 1995.
The artist lives and works in Kolkata, India.