Sharmistha Ray was born in Calcutta, India and lived in Kuwait before moving with her family to the United States in 1997. She holds a degree from Williams College (B.A.) and a dual degree from Pratt Institute (M.F.A. in Painting/M.S. in Theory, Criticism & History of Art, Design & Architecture).
In 2004, Ray was the first artist of Indian origin to win the prestigious Joan Mitchell M.F.A. Grant, awarded to 10 emerging painters and sculptors in the U.S. every year for the series of paintings Crossroads (2003-2004). She deployed the grant funds to travel to India on an exploratory mission in January 2006. “I wanted to see what India could do to me and, in turn what I could do in India,” she says. “Looking back, it was like closing my eyes and take a deep sea dive. I just had to follow my instincts.”
Kolkata Studio (Jan. 2oo6-Oct. 2006)
On arriving in India, Ray spent ten months in Kolkata, the city of her origins, where she set up a painting studio. There, she experimented first with a highly stylized and symbolic form of painting to capture the essence of the kantha (or ‘running’) stitch that she encountered in textiles all over the city. Sharmistha combined this style with images of local city scenes like canoes on the river, animals pulling loads and sari-clad brides in a series called Between the Lines (2006).
For a few months, Ray explored an abstract way of expressing the experience of living in Kolkata through light, color and gesture, eventually moving away from geometrically inspired forms into a narrative form of abstraction. The intimately sized oil paintings plumbed the poetics of loci to create the self-reflexive series of paintings Traversations (2006).
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