As one of the 10 winners of the prestigious First Take 2024, Avijit Dutta also stands as a significant artist in today’s Indian art scene. Born in 1997 in the industrial town of Howrah, West Bengal, he was raised in an atmosphere where the grim realities of industrialisation and its toll on humans and the environment surrounded him. This deep bond with his hometown has played a moulding role in Dutta’s artistic practice, which largely revolves around stories of everyday working people and their lives in industrial environments.
His oeuvre incorporates a surrealistic representation of Howrah’s iron industry, signifying the conflict between nature and industrialisation — a theme that underlines his works. Dutta’s signature technique mixes organic shapes with human figures. He often magnifies commonplace objects such as mosquito nets, bricks and natural scrubbers to become epic symbols of the socio-cultural textile of his surroundings. Drawing on his own experience of Howrah, he uses everyday materials, often iron dust and soil from the place itself, not just to depict, but to create an immersive and intimate connection with both his own story and the viewer’s.
8.5X7.5 In each, 2024 | Courtesy: Avijit Dutta
Through his works, Dutta highlights the rapid decimation of nature’s beauty at the altar of unrelenting industrial growth. His recent works like Tiffin Time and Helpers II embody this sentiment, in which he depicts labourers in the factory interior as unrelenting co-workers united in a common hope for sustenance. Tiffin Time and Helpers II were selected for this year’s First Take. These works reflect the collective perseverance and community spirit embedded within the core of industrial living.
18X29 In, 2024| Courtesy: Avijit Dutta
His most recent exhibition, Beyond the Industrial Veil: Metaphors of Howrah, was curated by Tarrain. Through a mixed-media lens, Dutta keeps exploring industrial life’s underbelly. The show’s achievement speaks to his ability to blend reality and metaphor, providing a jarring visual contrast to Howrah’s industrialised ethos, but also an opportunity to reflect on the world of man.
Dutta’s recognition comes at a crucial juncture in his career. His awards include the First Award at IMAGINARIUM 4.0, Emami Art, Kolkata (2024), and several awards from the Government College Art and Craft, Calcutta, including the Rabindranath Tagore Award, and Geeta Das Award (2021-2022). He was also awarded the Most Promising Artist of 2020-2021 by The Art Society of India, Mumbai. With major participations such as the 56th Annual Art Exhibition Birla Academy, Kolkata (2023) and the The Observer’s Reflection (Art Heritage, New Delhi, 2023) under his belt, he has secured himself a firm spot on the contemporary Indian Arts Map.
Dutta’s artistic vision stems from a complex knowledge about Howrah, his childhood home, that combines subjective experience with big ideas about work, change and sustenance. His body of work is simultaneously an homage to and critique of the socio-economic realities within which he was raised. Dutta’s work is imbued with powerful symbolism and he encourages the viewer to immerse themselves in not only the beauty he has experienced but also the stories of those whose contributions are often, unassumingly splintered wrenched from what they create.
His entry on the First Take 2024 is truly a milestone moment, which speaks for the significance of his voice getting recognition in the Indian art space. But today, Avijit Dutta, who is still developing his artistic practice, still wants to speak for his people, the Howrah workers, and himself as somebody striving with the ongoing fight human aspiration constantly has to have with nature. Nature here is not just the realities of existence, but the critical characteristics of nature we are now trained to think about.
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