Paintings
Hidden Geographies, 2012 (Solo)
Hidden Geographies references historical styles like Romanticism and Impressionism and the lyrical agency of female vanguard painters like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, while positing a contrary paradigm to Western art historical ideals, evident in her choice of color and dense patterning. Ray’s metascapes are suspended in time between mythos and reality exposing an intimate topography of the subconscious mind.
Studies - Psychic Objects, 2011 - 2012
Psychic Objects are a set of studies that Ray embarked on in 2011 that explore the spaces of memory and the psyche in form and color. They result from leftover paint in the studio, which she appropriates as residue of the larger format paintings. The studies become traces of the past and are symptomatic of the source from which they originate.
Landscape as Metaphor, 2009-2011
Landscape as Metaphor draw upon the physical and poetical aspects of urban life in Mumbai city with its shifts, nuances and complexities. Drawing on earlier experiments with abstract painting and the natural realm, these paintings further the investigation of materiality and abstraction, forming an enquiry into the tension between the image and its relationship to meaning.
Traversations, 2006
Traversations combine the words of “travel” and “conversations” to explore the kinetic nature of migration in painterly form. The artist had just moved from the United States to India and these small-format works have a heightened interiority that evokes the intimate spaces of the psyche. Their miniature quality - a compact study of color, gesture and blurring effects - belies their psychological momentum.
Between the Lines, 2006
Between the Lines is inspired by the running (or “kantha”) stitch that is emblematic of the textile traditions of Bengal. The artist was living in Kolkata for a brief time in 2006 and these paintings explore regional forms, focusing on the idea of patterning which is central to all Eastern artistic traditions. This preoccupation re-emerges later in the artist's oeuvre as a counterpoint to western paradigms.
Crossroads, 2003-2004
Crossroads investigates a significant inflection point in the artist’s life related to cultural identity. She combines her figurative sensibilities and draftsmanship skills with a painterly, abstract language using a monochromatic palette and densely worked surfaces rendered with oil and wax to create narratives about displacement post 9/11. The series was awarded the Joan Mitchell M.F.A. Grant.
Perspectives, 2002
Perspectives was the artist’s first major study using the metaphor of nature to create an abstract language for painting. Sharmistha was primarily a figurative artist when she arrived in New York in 2001. Exposure to both historical and contemporary abstraction in New York became the impetus to study the space between representation and non-representation.
Mybrids, 2002
Mybrids is one of Sharmistha’s last purely figurative works before she entered into the realm of abstract painting. This large-format triptych takes on a self-reflexive position to explore the philosophical condition of "anxiety" in a globalizing world. Embodying both human and animal features, these grotesque creatures exist in permanent exile amongst leaves and dense foliage.
