Sekhar Roy is a senior contemporary Indian painter whose practice has developed over more than four decades. Born in 1957, he studied Applied Art at the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata. Although his formal training was directed towards commercial art, Roy gradually moved away from applied practice to pursue painting independently. His early professional work as an illustrator strengthened his command of drawing, but he consciously resisted allowing illustration to determine his artistic language.
Roy’s paintings are closely connected with the psychological and social experience of Kolkata. His work frequently addresses loneliness, anxiety, displacement, and the pressures of urban life, particularly as experienced by the middle class. Human figures appear isolated, wounded, masked, or enclosed within ambiguous surroundings. Their physical condition often reflects a deeper emotional unease.
His early practice was shaped by the political violence and socio-economic uncertainty of Bengal during the 1970s. Rather than illustrating specific events, Roy translated this atmosphere into an expressionist visual language marked by distorted figures, sombre colour, and psychologically charged spaces. His first major solo exhibition, Metamorphosis, was held at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, in 1987. Influenced in part by his reading of Franz Kafka and Albert Camus, the series examined transformation, estrangement, and the instability of human identity.
Visual Language and Technique
Roy works in acrylic, oil, watercolour, charcoal, and mixed media. His paintings are distinguished by fluid handling, layered textures, and a restrained but expressive palette. Greens, browns, yellows, blues, greys, and black frequently create an atmosphere of interior tension and urban decay.
Texture has remained central to his practice. Weathered walls, damp surfaces, bandages, wood, insects, and fragments of the city’s neglected environments have provided both visual and material inspiration. The bandage, which appeared repeatedly in an important phase of his work, emerged from his visits to hospitals in Kolkata. It became a metaphor for injury, fragility, healing, and the wounded condition of contemporary society.
Roy does not usually begin with a fully predetermined composition. He has described his method as one of “impulsion,” in which colour and gesture gradually suggest emerging forms. Figures develop through an intuitive exchange between the artist and the surface. Despite this spontaneity, the completed works reveal a strong understanding of structure, balance, and pictorial rhythm.
His practice has continually evolved through distinct groups of work, including the Metamorphosis, Intellectual, Boat, and urban figurative series. He has also experimented with wood and shaped supports, allowing painting to approach the physical presence of sculpture. In works addressing terrorism and violence, the human body becomes trapped, fragmented, or confined within structures of its own creation.
Exhibitions and Recognition
Sekhar Roy has held numerous solo exhibitions in India and abroad. Important presentations include the British Council, Kolkata (1985); Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata (1987); Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai (1991 and 1994); Gallery 88, Kolkata (1991, 1993, 2000 and 2004); Gallery Espace, New Delhi (1992); Kunst im Kotten, Solingen, Germany (1995); Artworld, Chennai (2000); Gallery Crimson, Bengaluru (2000 and 2002); and Arushi Arts, New Delhi (2004 and 2005).
His work has also been included in international and curated exhibitions such as Artists from Bengal at the Nehru Centre, London, in 2006; Art of Bengal at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, in 2006; Go See India in Sweden in 2010; and Urban Narratives at Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, in 2013.
Roy received the Senior Fellowship of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in 2000. His works are represented in institutional and corporate collections including the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Lalit Kala Akademi, the Ministry of Defence, Government of India, the British Deputy High Commission, the Taj Group of Hotels, ITC, and BNP Paribas, as well as private collections in India and abroad.
Association with Aakriti Art Gallery
Sekhar Roy has maintained a significant association with Aakriti Art Gallery, Kolkata. The gallery presented solo exhibitions of his work in 2007 and 2012. The 2012 exhibition, Tracing the Invisible Points of Origin, examined the evolving relationship between figuration, nature, memory, and intuitive image-making within his practice.
He also participated in Aakriti’s exhibition Art Against Terrorism in 2009 and in the gallery’s critical and editorial programmes. A substantial profile and interview published in Art News & Views documented his artistic development, working process, and engagement with Kolkata’s social and cultural environment.
Sekhar Roy’s importance lies in his ability to transform the familiar realities of urban life into a psychologically intense figurative language. Through fluid surfaces, wounded bodies, symbolic materials, and continually changing imagery, he has created a body of work that reflects both the vulnerability of the individual and the broader anxieties of contemporary society.
