When Shipra Bhattacharya’s ‘In Bloom: A Journey through the Five Decades of Shipra Bhattacharya’ opens at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Bikaner House, on 15 November, the solo exhibition will not only mark the return of the veteran painter to New Delhi after a decade, but also the re-emergence of a distinctive artistic ethos that stands apart from the myriad of Indian contemporary arts practices of now. Curated by the artist’s daughter, creative director Jonaki Bhattacharya, this major exhibition traces an oeuvre that is as inward as it is expansive — grounded in empathy, memory, and a fierce dedication to figuration that has remained remarkably steadfast through shifting artistic movements in the country.

Born and based in Kolkata, Bhattacharya emerged as an artist with a singular voice in the early 1980s — a period when Indian art was in a state of self-reinvention. The post-Emergency decade had seen the Progressive Artists Group’s modernism give way to new idioms: narrative figuration, feminist self-articulation, and the politically charged realism of Arpita Singh, Nalini Malani, Nilima Sheikh, and Navjot Altaf. Amidst this cohort, Bhattacharya emerged as an artist carving her own space — one of lyrical resistance rather than overt polemic against the socio-political milieu.

Her early works drew from the lives of urban workers living on the streets outside her Kolkata home. “I used to watch their lives unfold on the streets, how they cooked, washed their clothes, and slept on the pavements… this environment intrigued me and I painted from these scenes of life on the streets of boi-parra (Kolkata’s legendary open-air book market in College Street).”

In the 1990s and 2000s, Bhattacharya’s most acclaimed bodies of work, featuring the recurring motif of women on terraces and balconies — self-contained yet alert to the world beyond — emerged as both meditations on solitude and assertions of agency in the face of rapid globalisation and gentrification of India’s urban spaces. In these works, everyday domestic architecture became a metaphysical threshold. The terrace, suspended between the private and the public, became a site of contemplation, personal and collective liberation, and rebellion. In this sense, Bhattacharya’s figuration feels akin to Arpita Singh’s dreamlike urban women or Nilima Sheikh’s mythic protagonists, yet her voice remains distinct: tender, sensuous, imbued with an emotional depth that conceals its subversive edge.

Over the decades, Bhattacharya’s palette has deepened and her iconography has expanded from lyrical urban scenes to more political reflections. The exhibition features significant works from across the past five decades — such as ‘Taposhi’, a response to the Singur peasant movement, and ‘Stop War’ (2014), a visceral meditation on global conflict —revealing how Bhattacharya’s moral clarity coexists with her lyrical sensibility.

What remains consistent is her focus on the dignity of the human form —especially the female body—as a vessel of profound inner lives. In works from the iconic ‘She’ series, the female figure embodies cosmic consciousness, poised between material and mythic realities. Later series— such as ‘Desire’ and ‘He’—reframe yearning and masculinity through painterly empathy, suggesting that vulnerability and imagination are themselves deeply personal and political acts.

As Indian contemporary artists increasingly perform their globality through spectacle, scale, and conceptual abstraction, Bhattacharya’s commitment to the figurative feels radical in itself. She belongs to a lineage of artists who resist erasure by remaining rooted in the human form. Like Sudhir Patwardhan’s workers, Atul Dodiya’s self-portraits, or Anju Dodiya’s mytho-personal theatre, Bhattacharya’s figures speak from within a shared psychic terrain of postcolonial modernity: equally fractured, hopeful, and intimate.

Across five decades, Bhattacharya’s work has evolved in tandem with India’s social transformations: from the turmoil of the 1980s to the liberalisation of the 1990s and the ongoing environmental and political crises of the 21st century. Yet her gaze has remained inward, as if to remind us that introspection, too, is a form of resistance. This commitmen — to silence as subversion — anchors her work within the moral imagination of contemporary Indian art.

To encounter Bhattacharya’s paintings today is to be reminded of what has often been lost in the transition from the intimacy of the artist’s studio to the publicity of the global art fair: an attention to the inner life and to the moral and metaphysical undercurrents of form. Her chromatic gradations, often glowing with the lushness of natural abundance or the shimmer of silk, evoke the Bengali aesthetic of alpona and pata painting. At the same time, her treatment of space feels cinematic, echoing the languid frames of Mrinal Sen’s Kolkata or the melancholy of Satyajit Ray’s women gazing out of windows.

By placing her practice within this continuum — from the narrative figuration of the 1980s to the plural experimentations of today—‘In Bloom’ becomes both a tribute and a reckoning to Bhattacharya’s life in the arts. It asks: What does it mean to paint the human form in an age that has become increasingly inhuman? What does it mean to hold on to empathy, lyricism, and care as artistic values?

Five decades on, Bhattacharya’s works stand out not only for their stylistic innovations and interventions but also for their emotional perseverance. She has painted through several eras of upheaval without ever abandoning her belief in the transformative power of looking — of bearing witness with grace. Today, her work reminds us that to be in bloom is not to be in full flower but to be in the perpetual act of becoming.

‘In Bloom: A Journey through the Five Decades of Shipra Bhattacharya’ is on view at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Bikaner House, from 15 November to 23 November 2025. Learn more here.

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