Rabin Mondal was born in 1932, in Kolkata, in a poor government official`s family. He graduated with Diploma in Fine Arts from the Vidyasagar Art School.His works exploit the grotesque to express inner turmoil and human struggles. His feeling towards his environment has been rather queer. Perhaps the milieu in which he spent his formative years has something to do with it.
WORKS
Works
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Rabin Mondal was born in 1932, in Kolkata, in a poor government official`s family. He graduated with Diploma in Fine Arts from the Vidyasagar Art School.His works exploit the grotesque to express inner turmoil and human struggles. His feeling towards his environment has been rather queer. Perhaps the milieu in which he spent his formative years has something to do with it. Mondal grew up in a populous industrial town of Howrah, near Kolkata. “I know the big city across the Ganga intimately,” he says. “In the dark alleys ofthe city, nightmarish poverty stared one in the face. I saw the poorest of the poor and the affluent live within a stone throw away form each other. It was tragic to watch some lying untreated, while those who could afford it continued to spend money on even a dead man.”
As a young painter, Mondal was attracted by Jamini Roy`s folk style and Rabindranath Tagore`s disquieting paintings and drawings. But the show by French artists was virtually a turning point in his artistic career. “This was like opening a window to an astounding, astonishing, unsuspected world,” he says. This encounter with avant-garde Western art helped him to later incorporate elements from it in his own work.
His works were first displayed in 1955, as part of a group exhibition along with other leading artists of Bengal school. He held his first solo exhibition in 1961 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata. Mondal`s works are mainly figurative. He paints in bold strokes and creates tableaux, whose themes are universal. The faces of his figures stare at you out of the canvas, strange and pensive, but also strong and defiant. Not yet beaten, surviving by sheer force of spirit. He mostly uses dense pigments in blacks and reds, with only occasional moss green and turquoise colors seeping through.
Mondal has also been quite active with the avant-garde artist`s organizations in the city. He was a Lalit Kala Academy member from 1979-1982 that has also published a book of his drawings. It had taken Rabin Mondal decades to emerge as one of India`s leading modern painters.
The artist passed away on 2 July 2019.
