Goutam Ghosh: Reptiles

The Kunsthaus Hamburg is pleased to present the artist Goutam Ghosh’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. With his paintings, Ghosh navigates the various influences of traditional Indian philosophies and rational sciences that he succeeds to translate into an autonomous and poetic imagery that combines abstraction and figurativeness. His gestural, detailed and at times sign-like paintings are informed by a variety of disciplines including religion, magic, geology, music, and mathematics.

Ghosh finds a direct and important reference in the texts of the Indian scholar Kaustubh Das, who from a present-day perspective deals with the Indian philosophical movement of Tantra—the teachings of consciousness as the basis of both human thought and action. Just like the artist’s intellectual references are rooted in the traditions of his homeland, the formal languages of his paintings are independent and contemporary. Ghosh’s works are mostly created by means of a glazing gouache technique on wax paper or roughly woven linen and presented unframed or mounted on plywood panels. With his visual vocabulary, Ghosh points to the dependency of the human process of cognition on quantifiable data and patterns that are combined with filigree, amorphous or animistic forms in his works.

The paintings featured in the show are supplemented by the 16mm film PAARA. This work was produced in collaboration with the Norwegian artist Jason Havneraas in India in 2018 and relates the fictive recollections of a 90-year-old magician. The story unfolds in partially surrealistic, staged scenes against the backdrop of impressive pictures of the landscape. In both the film and the paintings, the artist repeatedly leads us to the structure of the pattern as the link between mind and object, between academic disciplines and metaphysics. Both are accommodated in Ghosh’s abstract-poetic oeuvre.

Curated by Katja Schroeder

Goutam Ghosh (*1979, Nabadwip, Indien) lives and works in Santiniketan, India. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Oslo and at the Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, Baroda in India. He had solo shows with STANDARD (OSLO), Oslo (2018/15) and Project 88, Mumbai (2017) and participated in international group exhibitions: David Zwirner Gallery, London (2017); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2017); The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2016); Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai (2016); Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Neapel (2015) at al.

In the framework of its grant programme “Catalogues for Young Artists,” the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung supports Goutam Ghosh´s exhibition at the Kunsthaus Hamburg including the production of his accompanying catalogue.