After returning to India from his studies in Paris in the mid-1960s, Jogen Chowdhury found work as a textile designer in Madras, and then moved to Delhi in 1972. During his time there, the artist developed what has come to be known as his signature style of figuration. His highly-detailed works on paper are executed in ink and pastel, their figures and objects set against pitch black backgrounds. The emphasis was on strong, sinuous lines, and Chowdhury used a distinctive crosshatching technique within these lines to achieve tonal variations, volume, texture and movement. The artist’s remarkable draughtsmanship reflects his work with textiles, where repetition, patterning and direction were paramount.

In the present lot, Chowdhury uses this technique to portray an eagle-like bird. Much like his human figures, here the subject’s disproportionate, fleshy body is carefully constructed from fine crosshatched lines, appearing to heave and sag like a shapeshifting amoeba. A caricature of the bird’s typical regal depictions and antithetical to its noble associations, in Chowdhury’s version the wings are distorted and the legs are elongated, ending in exaggerated talons that are reminiscent of prehistoric predators.

This unique interpretation of form, both human and animal, is “simplified, as if through x-ray vision: attenuated, exaggerated, fragmented, reconfigured and rephrased, thus intensifying its visual and conceptual expression. For Chowdhury, the body has to communicate in silence. Often placing it against a dark, vacant background, he does not appropriate the specificities of place or environment; instead he transfers feelings of anguish on to the solitary figure through his gestural mark-making. His deep, dense crosshatched lines simulate body hair and a web of veins take away the smooth sensuality of the classical body to manifest the textures of life.” (K. Singh, India Modern: Narratives from 20th Century Indian Art, New Delhi, 2015, p. 129)

Reviewing Chowdhury’s work in 1976, the year the present lot was executed, the critic Richard Bartholomew notes that “his drawings are remarkable for their economy of means and directness of purpose. The outline does not embellish the figure but delineates it. The structure of the body and the folds of the flesh forming a substantial image modelled only slightly with firm, sure hatching-in lines of coloured ink.” (R. Bartholomew, ‘Mixed Group of Bengal Artists’, Times of India, 6 April 1976)