Jogen Chowdhury is a travelling exhibition featuring a collection of forty significant works by the artist from the Glenbarra Art Museum in Himeji, Japan. The exhibition spans four decades of work by Jogen, comprising works on paper, with ink and pastels, his most preferred medium, with the earliest work on view from 1965.
Jogen Chowdhury is known for his ability to successfully marry traditional imagery with the zeitgeist of contemporary painting, in a skillful blend of an urbane self- awareness and a highly localized Bengali influence. His early works show an attention to figuration that carries through in his current pieces. In an interview, Chowdhury commented that, in his early works, “the space projected a simple iconic presence. A spatial sequence was worked out but the space was not complex. The background seemed to vanish.” During his college days, Chowdhury took part in leftist literary circles, the members of which dismissed Rabindranath Tagore as a bourgeoisie and became interested in the works of Russian authors. But by and large, Chowdhury kept himself apart from cultural movements; though a friend of the members of the Hungry Generation, his imagery was drawn from his cultural background more than his intellectual milieu.
In 2005, the Glenbarra Art Museum published, Jogen Chowdhury: Enigmatic Visions, on the works of the artist from the museum’s collection. Masanori Fukuoka, the man behind the collection, has been an important contributor and supporter of Indian art and artists since 1989. He established the Glenbarra Art Museum in 1990 which houses modern and contemporary Indian Art. In November 2019, the collection was relocated to a newly designed museum by Kawazoe Junichiro.