BHASHA CHAKRABARTI

Bhasha’s oeuvre, traversing oil painting and textile installation, foregrounds the relationship between the body and cloth, as carriers of interwoven subjectivities and historical entanglements. Within this new series of oil paintings, Bhasha takes her practice a step further. The solitary subjects that have been the focus of previous figurative works are now entwined in reciprocal intimacy. In the large oil on jute painting The Intertwining I (2022) - named after the theory of flesh by philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty¹ - we see two bodies sharing a moment of passion, their energy making them appear to leap off the bed, and the surface of the painting. Here, the artist is deeply interested in the edges of the body, in the exploration of skin as the medium through which we know the world around us (and thus ourselves), as well as the gestures enacted by wrists, fingers, calves, and feet in moments of togetherness.

In Handfeel I & II (2022), two circular oil on panel paintings, the artist creates peepholes onto the edge of beds where two kinds of intimacies are being played out. One is sensual as between lovers, and the other familial holding years of tender care. A joyous light bounces off the figures and the unmade sheets around them, accentuated in the chiasmic kinship of holding and being held. The two works are installed back-to-back in the gallery, almost skin to skin, conjuring a temporal loop between these memories of touch.

The reciprocity at the heart of this exhibition is not limited only to the painted figures on view, but rather emerges from Bhasha’s relationships to the surfaces she works with. They respond to each tender caress, each firm stroke in the stretching and priming process that she undertakes herself to co-produce the lush poetry, the visceral density that emanates from her paintings. She places equal importance on the visual content of painting, the performativity of the act of painting, and the materiality of the cloth on which paintings are made. This excerpt by Audre Lorde that has been an inspiration for the artist allows a glimpse into her process —”..my body / writes into your flesh / the poem / you make of me..” (Recreation, 1997.²) Bhasha has also drawn from intergenerational wisdom that recommends skin-to-skin contact between infant and parent as a way to share cellular knowledge building up the immunity of the newborn. She extends this ritual, enacting a form of skin-to-skin by covering her own body with pigment to imprint upon soft, lustrous uterine parchment pieces. Three of these impressions, Skin to Skin I, II & III (2022) are delicately stretched in brass frames and suspended in the gallery allowing a plurilateral view.

Through this assemblage of works Bhasha not only pushes the lexicon of queer representation, but also opens up space to reflect upon the effects of touch - or lack thereof - in wake of the recent pandemic, caste-based violence in the Indian subcontinent, and the segregation of Black communities in the US. In doing so, the artist continues a critical engagement with complex histories and their proliferation into everyday life, all the while strengthening her commitment to a practice rooted in ‘radical hope’³.

Bhasha Chakrabarti (b. 1991, Honolulu, HI) graduated with an MFA in Painting and Printmakingfrom the Yale School of Art in the Spring of 2022. The artist has exhibited in solo and group shows at Jeffery Deitch (New York & Los Angeles), Hales (New York), Experimenter (Kolkata), M+B (Los Angeles), Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore) and Lyles & King (New York). Chakrabarti was a semi-finalist in the Smithsonian’s 2022 Outwin-Boochever Portrait Competition and was awarded a Beinecke Research Fellowship in 2021 and the Fountainhead Residency in 2020. Her works have been written about in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artsy, Juxtapoz, and Arte Fuse. Bhasha Chakrabarti currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.

¹ The Intertwining — The Chiasm in Merleau-Ponty, M. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by A. Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
² Lorde, Audre. The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
³ Lear, Jonathan. ’Radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation’, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2006