Petrifier, 2025

Abhrajit Kundu's (b. 1999) practice situates itself within the field of contradiction that structures contemporary life — where freedom and surveillance, development and destruction, visibility and erasure, truth and fabrication operate side by side without resolution. Rather than treating these opposing realities as cancelling each other out, he takes their simultaneous presence as the condition of the everyday. Working primarily in painting, Kundu builds surreal and layered visual narratives by combining drawing, distorted forms, and altered visual elements, placing imagined, exaggerated, and absurd imagery in dialogue with lived social and political conditions. Fantasy, in his work, does not escape reality but sharpens its presence.

Satire and distortion are central strategies in his work. Kundu approaches serious realities obliquely, proposing that they need not require solemn representation. Humour operates as a critical device, exposing contradiction, generating questions, and making visible the unease that hides beneath the surface of ordinary life. Digitally distorted forms and references to slapstick comedy construct a layered visual language in which exaggeration, absurdity, and visual disruption mirror the fractured nature of perception in the present. The characters populating his works function as metaphors that carry irony and humour while revealing deeper registers of social and political unrest. By keeping his imagery open-ended, Kundu invites viewers to interpret the work through their own positions within society, producing scenes that are at once absurd and unsettling, familiar and distorted.

Kundu's early environment of Howrah, West Bengal — where political tension, inequality, and social chaos were part of daily experience — continues to shape how he observes and interprets the world, sharpening an awareness of how power, information, and control operate within a post-truth condition in which the boundary between truth and falsehood is increasingly unstable. He holds a Master of Visual Arts in Painting from The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU), Vadodara (2026), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from The Indian College of Arts and Draftsmanship, Kolkata (2023), where he was awarded the Principal Award at the college's annual exhibition (2023). His recent exhibitions include the CIMA Award Show (Kolkata, 2025), 'AAGAM', the MVA-I Preview Show at MSU Baroda (Vadodara, 2025), the West Bengal State Academy of Dance, Drama and Visual Arts annual exhibition (Kolkata, 2023 and 2024), 'In Search of Imperatives' at the Ami Art Festival, KCC, curated by Nanak Ganguly (Kolkata, 2023), and the Indian Society of Oriental Art annual exhibition (Kolkata, 2019), where he received the Salil Kumar Acharya Memorial Award.