Biren De
Untitled 55, Circa 1960
Crayon on paper
5 x 6 inches
Aicon Contemporary is proud to present Biren De: Pre-Tantric Works from the Herwitz Collection. Biren De (1926-2011) was a painter and educator, best known for his Tantric paintings. He was born in present day Bangladesh, and moved to Kolkata to attend the Government College of Art. In the early years after India’s independence he moved to Delhi, the capital of the new nation. There he executed large scale public art commissions, while he also taught at the College of Art, Delhi. During his time as a professor, he came to New York on a Fulbright Scholarship in the late fifties or early sixties. It was in New York that his work started to move in direction of Tantra which would eventually go on to define him.
Chester Herwitz, owner of a leather company in Worcester, MA, first visited India with his wife in 1961, and they returned often. In the mid-1960's, they began buying paintings by M. F. Husain, who introduced them to other artists, including to Biren De. Their varied collection grew to include 3,000 works. Works from the Herwitz collection have been exhibited at the Tate Gallery in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Worcester Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, and the Grey Gallery in Manhattan.
Chester Herwitz would often buy out all available work of artists whose work he liked. This would include not only their larger canvases of paperworks, but equally smaller works the artists had made in pads, providing an intimate view of their artistic practice. These collections often spanned years, if not decades of the artist’s career.
The works in the current show are one such window into the early and fluid practice of Biren De. From which it is possible to draw almost straight line connections to the palette and the formal practice of De in his later years.
Biren De
Untitled Sketch (Woman Stretching), Circa 1960
Crayon on paper
4.50 x 4 inches
Biren De (b.1926-2011) started out as a portrait painter, then moved on to more figuratively works to later transition to more abstract representation. His art practice took a major turn in the late 50’s, as he was steering away from the western abstraction, and urged his peers to work with inner experiences. During this time, western abstraction was hard edged, whereas De’s abstraction was fluid and suggestive and all about dispersion, diffusion and dematerialisation. His experiments with energies, results in artworks made with light colors that gives the viewer a sense of piece, in contrast to the artworks painted in deep blues and blazing reds, that are meant to awaken the psyche towards an undivided consciousness. In addition, his creative use of light and shadow creates a magical effect on the art. His play with energies, made him add phallic and yonic symbols, a u-like form for the female energy and a straight wedge-like shape for the male energy. This practice also gave in to a recurrent use of symbols such as the wheel, the sun, the lotus, and seeds. He often used yellow, blue and red for his artworks.
Biren De studied Fine Arts at the Government College of Arts & Crafts, in Kalkuta, in 1944. He left the final year without taking the certificate due to a spat with the principal. He received the fulbright scholarship in 1959, which enabled him to live and work in New York for a year. De taught at the College of art, in New Delhi, between 1952 and 1963. De passed away in 2011.