PUJA SARKAR
Puja Sarkar is an Indian Visual Artist, Curator and Social Activist based in Kolkata. She
received B.V.A (2007) and MFA (2009) degree in Painting from the Faculty of Visual Arts at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. After completing Art College, Puja has been actively working as a full-time artist for 15 years. Since 2009, she also founded and runs ‘SMS - A Group of Artists’, a well-known artistic and social organization.
Puja has participated in many international sponsored exhibitions (including solo shows).
She also participated in more than 100 national exhibitions, including eighty sponsored shows, and in national and international art fairs, painting camps, residencies and workshops. She got many awards from nationally and internationally. In 2022, she was awarded a Junior Fellowship in Painting 2019–2020 by the Centre for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT), Ministry of Culture, Govt. of India, New Delhi. In Her artwork has been featured in various publications nationally and globally. Puja also curates many talk shows, prestigious art shows.
Artist Puja Sarkar’s paintings are autobiographical. As an artist, she reinterprets her life from a feminist perspective, exploring expressionistic techniques in a bold and raw manner. The distortion of forms and shapes makes her paintings abstract, which narrates a story about her life in an unorthodox manner. She is an impulsive artist who violently experiments with human forms on the pictorial plane. Her surrounding environment and society deeply affect her creation. Due to expressionistic distortion, the painted images become abstract. But after a close inspection, the viewer can make out the presence of human beings in her artwork. She explores the human condition in a bizarre manner that also evokes a sense of sexual explicitity, pushing the viewers into a discomfort zone. While working, she uses brushes, rollers, inks, and colours intuitively, and bright colours and ingenious textures are manipulated aptly in her paintings.