The women with red hair

The women in Asit Kumar Patnaik’s paintings nearly always have red hair, and the colour goes back to his mother, who raised five children after their father died young and made sure each one was educated, so that red became, for the son, a sign of strength, freedom and steady presence.

That story is a good way into Continuum, a 30-year retrospective presented by Chawla Art Gallery and curated by Shibani Chawla, which began at Bikaner House and continues at the gallery in Saket till November 30, gathering around 50 works since 1995, several of them never shown before.

One large canvas carries the viewer to the ghats of Varanasi, where Patnaik studied, with tonsured men in black waist cloths painted in lilac and blue, heads shaved in memory of departed elders, while a flame-orange woman lifts a speckled sheet among them against a mossy green ground, half hiding and half showing herself.

Two smaller works hang side by side like two halves of one thought, a shaven figure resting a cheek on one hand and a red-haired woman looking down beneath a collaged scarf, both set on cracked, bark-like brown surfaces that show his love of texture, which he also builds with wood, fibreglass, paper and thread.

“From my early years in Cuttack and Banaras to developing my practice in Delhi, my surroundings and experiences have continually influenced the way I work,” says Patnaik. Chawla, who has known his work for nearly three decades, admires how he has kept “a distinctive visual language while remaining willing to experiment and take artistic risks.”