Debosmita Samanta was born and brought up in West Bengal. She completed her B.V.A (Painting) from the College of Art and Design, Burdwan University in 2010, and her M.F.A (Painting) from S.N. School of Arts and Communication, Hyderabad University in 2012.

Past Exhibitions

2024 | Young Collectors Weekend | Cultivate Art, Mumbai

2024 | Mirror Mirror On The Wall | Gallery ChampaTree, New Delhi

2024 | Parallel Realities | Gallery Ekami, Kerala

2023 | Reverence | Gallery Veda, Chennai

2023 | Whose Memoirs? Whose Archives?- An Empirical Survey | Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad,

2023 | Chitram - Art inspired by Indian movies

2022 | Echoes and Time Unfolded | Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad,

2021 | Eastern Accents : 9 Contemporary Artists | Janus Art Gallery, Kolkata

2021 | Facets of the People | Gallery OED, Cochin, Kerala

2019 | Residency | Kalakriti Art gallery, Hyderabad

Awards

2017 | S Merit Award from the 1st National Exhibition of Art, Karnataka Lalithakala Academy in 2017.

In line with Debosmita's visual storytelling practice, the exhibition has been presented in a series of chapters that narrates her works in format similiar to a storytelling book narrating tales of tradition, culture and personal experience.

60" x 42" | Oil on Canvas

This painting needs to be textured with the kind of analysis provided by the artist herself—so that any formal analysis in conjunction with a subjective reading of global and micropolitics perpetuates a sense of our connectedness to shared events and the precise nature of our relationship to others. This painting where Debosmita intervenes the four bloody red streets inward or outward, crossing over on the brilliant stage, might be a suggestion of a confined interior space embodied by women. The situation in this painting evokes the urge to be free. Within the drama of a catastrophic sky, the interplay of powerful popular characters, and elements of fantasy create the artist's unique mythological world at a crossroads of many lives of a human being. 

30" x 30" | Oil on Canvas

The predominant character of Debosmita’s painting is to recreate an alternative home amidst the open air. Reflecting interiorscape in an exterior world, of mind and physical space. To reconstruct the notion of private and public: as this work ‘A word in private’ delves into the everyday challenges middle-class women face in finding opportunities for private conversations within the confines of shared households. Despite their resourcefulness in creating these spaces, their privacy is sometimes encroached upon by the ‘bystanders’.To address such questions, we need to focus on the interpersonal negotiation with small details on this bigger picture. If you can squeeze your eyes on the very middle left you will find an astonished old man holding mangoes amidst a pumpkin grove accompanying a text that suggests the ownership of that domesticated crop. Also at a distance there is a glimpse of a Bengali calendar and a TV set submerged into the banana trees while others situate us in Debosmita’s own personal space. Again look at the sky and get down and listen to the women’s space, however one of them is looking at you consciously, seems alerting you to keep an empathetic distance.

57" x 31" | Oil on Canvas

Conscience—or empathy—is here revealed as essentially unwilled, arising from a body that is sympathetic in itself. The falling moon, dazzling groves, dark distance, lighten up a concise forest as if the viewer can walk into the deep silence of this painterly sleep. The surveillance and the streets become threatening to the reclining woman as we suddenly become conscious by looking at the awakened snake. Even as it remains clear that she is instigating the single act of sleeping that induces her fear and discomfort, there is an inevitable, self-perpetuating momentum to this scenario as the loop repeats in Debosmita’s whole practice. Space itself makes over its inhabitants—and this is the socio-political trope of this work.

36" Diameter | Oil on Canvas

Envisioning the mechanics of marriage as it will unfold in a particular location with a dramatic effect on the participant's own relationship to the space: This painting holds the landscape as a stage, banana leaves as a canopy enacting and situating marriage as a flamboyant gesture of social security. To identify the gathering in the middle ground of this painting, descending women in traditional attire touching each other to embrace the water actualises the act of holy bath to the bride we see in the foreground. There are the supporting characters as Debosmita has incorporated them as vernacular witnesses to the event. This painting resonates with the socio-familial diorama of marriage and kinship, holy and happy. Here, it is for art and for audiences of art to take the moral line—to witness, to feel the dichotomy and compassion, to use art to confirm us in our humanitarian role of marriage. 

48" x 15" | Oil on Canvas

To call this approach `contextual interpretation' describing an imagery which has developed through certain kinds of familial history, memory and interpretations. The visual method has tended to be conveyed by examples rather than by explication. 

22" x 46" | Oil on Canvas

The word ‘Bidaai’ or ‘Farewell’ can be coined in many ways. Here it not only represents a

 Wedding ritual, but also change in identity and a new address. The Ruckenfigur technique doesn't allow us to identify the bride in the painting but it somehow connects us to a similar situation of a life transition- relationships, responsibilities, expectations, change of surname and the idea of ‘home’. In the entire crowd of people, representing the fake sympathisers, there's only one character who looks directly into the eyes of the spectators, once again signifying/reminding  them of the importance of boundaries and distance 

30" x 12" | Oil on Canvas

Off roads- childhood nostalgia, a territorial exploration within psychological realism. By figuring memory in “title” as lived and felt in relation to a whole series of interconnected events and social forces, rather than as embodied in an atomized subject. The prominent road travels throughout the dimensions of time and space as we are able to move our eyes into a distinctive, personal to political framework of middle-class aspirations and petty ambitions. Instead of seeing it as a condition we might mimic or re-appropriate from an aesthetic standpoint, or analyse the appeal of her own thematic subjectivity.

48" x 21" | Oil on Canvas

Off roads- childhood nostalgia, a territorial exploration within psychological realism. By figuring memory in “title” as lived and felt in relation to a whole series of interconnected events and social forces, rather than as embodied in an atomized subject. The prominent road travels throughout the dimensions of time and space as we are able to move our eyes into a distinctive, personal to political framework of middle-class aspirations and petty ambitions. Instead of seeing it as a condition we might mimic or re-appropriate from an aesthetic standpoint, or analyse the appeal of her own thematic subjectivity.

60" x 10" Each (Diptych) | Oil on Linen

La La Land's captivating narrative intricately explores a woman's life cycle, featuring an elderly woman skillfully weaving a blanket for the future generation. The art of stitching 'kantha' holds significant cultural value within a 'moddhobitto' (middle-class) Bengali family. Additionally, The Yellow Land, drawing inspiration from Paul Gauguin’s 'Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?', portrays thoughtfully constructed scenarios, melodramas, myths, and memories.

11.5" x 16" | Oil on Canvas

Pertaining the woman's beauty and the moon, a gloomy, dark affirmation, her very desirability, becomes a response to certain practices of imaging, framing, lighting, movement, angle and gaze. She is thus more closely associated with the foreground of the painting than its illusory depths in the background. The painting certainly demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to the picture frame as a mirror, in which the alienated subject internalises the spectator as their own representation of imaginary existence. She is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion of day and night, landscapes, plants, personalised texts in which she articulates the look and creates the action of generational remembrance. 

40" x 30" | Oil on Canvas

Again, this is a mode of representation directed both by the artist and the spectator: she (the central woman figure) is on display for both of them. This work interplays between the generational remembrance and potential fantasy. Spectator would come close to find a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on her own formative luminous obsessions. Her beauty is overwhelming, standing firmly, often pictured in huge close-ups amidst a transforming landscape, seems to be the home, entering or leaving. The whole visual space is so perfectly connected to the paths, associated objects, events that the threat of loss or gain is dismissed as she is turned into a reassuring figure in an intimate relation to the artist and the spectator.

60" x 14" | Oil on Canvas

The painting "I had a series of dreams" implies a potential connection between the past, present, and future within a re-imagined space, such as a mindscape or dreamscape. The three layers of landscapes are intertwined by a vermillion red soil path, which also alludes to blood connections. The presence of a young girl on the left side of the painting, waiting outside the 'Khwaab Studio', conveys a sense of new beginnings and adventures. However, there is also a sense of confinement and boundaries, even in the absence of physical barriers.