Art treasures beyond currency | 'Vivartan' exhibtion at NGMA Kolkata

If like Frank Lloyd Wright, we are to believe that “the mother art is architecture”, nowhere does it ring truer than at the 143-year-old Currency Building, now home to NGMA Kolkata. Though inaugurated in 2020, it held only its third exhibition and the first of its kind in April 2026. “Our last two exhibitions were collaborative—the first one, Ghare Baire, was with DAG and the second, Material as Metaphor, was with Basu Foundation. This one is NGMA’s own,” says Sanjeev Kishor Goutam, director general, NGMA.

Vivartan: Fragments of Tradition and Continuity was put together to showcase art from Bengal and has roughly 125 pieces by everyone “from final-year art students to well-known masters”. Spread across three floors, winding through cavernous halls as Venetian windows light up hallways, it could be easy to overlook the art for the architecture. But that is not to say the craft on display is not compelling.

The exhibition begins with an homage to another mother—Mother India. The theme of ‘Vande Mataram’ depicts each stanza of the song through a painting and uses the painting of ‘Tvam hi Durga dasa-praharana-dharini’ as a segue into the second section, ‘Echoes of Divine and Folk’. Revealing “how spirituality and community life intertwine across time and place”, it brings alive gods and goddesses as part of everyday existence. Be it Surojit Majhi’s gouache on paper, which looks at Kali evolving from a prancing girl to the fierce goddess, or Manoj Mitra’s triptych of Kali, or even Bimal Kundu’s sublime wooden Buddha bust, divinity and meditations upon divinity are expressed in the hall that once stored treasures of the monetary kind.

Koushik Chatterjee, technical assistant, NGMA, says the exhibition was designed to feature newcomers, contemporary artists and maestros on an even platform. “When we approached senior artists like Pradip Mitra and asked if they would be willing to showcase their pieces if their art was placed with the new generation’s works, they agreed with alacrity. ‘How else can we be contemporary?’ they said.” No wonder then that the relatively newer artist David Malakar’s ‘Goodnight Calcutta 13’, which depicts Shiva in the centre of all things Kolkata, has been used as the largest image in the promotions, one of which is placed in the central courtyard. In the past, the courtyard was a hall topped with three domed skylights, but now it frames the blazing summer sky.

Go up the wooden staircase, and the section on ‘Unfolding Womanhood’ begins. Both Shrayosi Biswas’s mixed media and embroidery hoop series ‘The Story of a Busy Hand’ and Saurav Roy Chowdhury’s fibreglass and wire sculpture ‘Annihilation’ say more on a woman’s mental load than 2,000-word essays for Mother’s Day. Roy Chowdhury’s thought wires seamlessly walk you into ‘Mind Unveiled’, a contemporary art section that features lithographs, installations and kinetic sculptures depicting the “inner workings of the mind”. ‘Evolving Horizons’ comes next, with depictions of nature, landscapes and even ideas of identity going through “processes of growth, erosion, adaptation and renewal”. Part of that growth and change is, of course, urbanisation, which leads one to ‘City Life’. The exhibition comes to a close with a celebration of Kolkata, which Vishal Kumar Dev, curator of this exhibition, describes as “one of the most expressive cities in India”.

With overlapping themes, it’s almost impossible to tell where each section ends and another begins. ‘Evolving Horizons’ and ‘City Life’, for example, are separated and united by Rajkumar Samal’s ‘The Balance’. It shows a giant plumb bob that hangs from the ceiling. The sand brick, cement and fibre sculpture tethered to the very structure of the Currency Building seems to give Bengal’s artists a new currency.

—Vivartan runs at NGMA Kolkata, Old Currency Building, till June 30