Kartick Chandra Pyne

Kartick Chandra Pyne was born in 1931 in Kolkata, and received his Diploma in Fine Arts from the College of Arts and Crafts in the same city.

Pyne was an artist much ahead of his time. Whilst his contemporaries were still experimenting with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles and techniques on their canvases and painted under the influence of Gauguin and Cezannes works, Kartick Pyne was taken up by the aesthetics of the Post-Cubist European idiom. Artists like Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miro inspired him. He was one of the few Indian painters who, in breaking away from tradition, demonstrated that the Indian art scene at that time was stagnating and its products redundant.

At the time Pyne began to paint professionally, the common stress was on realism. Everyone was painting the rational and the beautiful. He tried to paint according to what was expected of an artist then for some time, but the pioneer in him made Pyne begin to introduce irrational elements in his work and start to express his feelings on canvas without any inhibitions. Kartick Pyne did not allow himself to be limited by only painting what was real, and therefore acceptable. In this artist`s work we see the use of inscrutable and complicated metaphors, that only he can explain, and what critics called free form images. Pyne was concerned with the spiritual, and in his trademark canvases we see an almost automatic outpouring of all that he is feeling. He chose his colours not on the basis of their visual appeal, but by what they meant to him. The random and surreal elements in his works are all rooted in his own perception of the world and its people.

Pyne, who was the elder brother of renowned modernist Ganesh Pyne, held several solo shows in India and participated in several exhibitions internationally, including 100 Years of Modern Indian Art held in the Fukuoka Museum, Japan in 1979 and the exhibition of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations in Bangladesh, held in 1992.

BORN

November 16, 1931 Kolkata

DIED

September 17, 2017 

EDUCATION QUALIFICATIONS

1955 Diploma in Fine Arts, Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2009 Aakriti Art Gallery, Kolkata

2007 Art Konsult, New Delhi

1993 Bajaj Art Gallery, Mumbai

1992 Gandhara Art Gallery, Kolkata

1991, 92, 93, 95, 97, 2001 Chitrakoot Art Gallery, Kolkata

1967, 80, 82 Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata

1961 All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society (AIFACS), New Delhi

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2010 Image and Symbol Painters Perception, Aakriti Art Gallery, Kolkata

1992 Organized by Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR) at Bangladesh

1991 Calcutta 300, Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata

1988 Drawing Exhibition, Chandigarh

1968 Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai

PARTICIPATIONS 

2003 Manifestations, organized by Delhi Art Gallery at World Trade Center, Mumbai and Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi

1994 8th Triennial India, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi

Asian Art Exhibition, organized by Chitrakoot Art Gallery at Singapore

1979 100 Years of Modern Indian Art, Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan

1968-87 Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi

HONORS AND AWARD 

1980-86 Scholarship from Indian Cultural Trust, Kolkata

1968-69 Scholarship from Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata

1966, 69, 73, 76 Academy of Fine Arts Award, Kolkata

1973,74 Mahakoshal Kala Parishad Prize