Colours of Joy

The paintings exude a sense of joie de vivre that only chirping birds spread over a colourful foliage can bring. There are other strokes of picturesque beauty as well — mountain terrain and pebbled paths — as well as uprooted flowering bushes filled in shopping carts and occasional animals on wheels who share space with antique candle stands and an avant-garde Louis Vuitton suitcase on a cart. These pictures by Sen are as far as it can get from the artist’s trademark grotesque oeuvre. “The gallery was packed,” says Sen,about the gala reception for the exhibition titled In Transit that opened on April 14 in the Taiwanese capital.

The exhibition comes a year after one of Sen’s most acclaimed shows Black Candy was held at Chemould Prescott Road,Mumbai.

She was invited for the Taipei exhibition in 2010 by Vita Wong,Vice-president,cultural development,Louis Vuitton,and Fumio Nanjo,director of Mori Art Museum,Japan. The brief was simple — Sen was to produce a body of work that was in tandem with what the luxury brand Louis Vuitton represents.

Pondering over the subject in her Charmwood village studio in Faridabad,Sen replaced her frequently used mediums — blood,teeth and tress — with watercolour on customised Japanese paper imported from a factory near Kyoto. As she worked on memories of her own childhood spent across India,her artistic journey had hiccups.

The first set of works presented to Nanjo in February this year was described as too depressing. “We spoke after the Tsunami and he suggested how there was need for optimism,following darkness and so many deaths,” says the artist,who spent 10 more days creating the current body of work.

The result has taken even Sen,a Skoda Prize winner for Indian Contemporary Art,by surprise. Pasted over light-boxes in Taipei,her works showed a different side to the artist’s personality. “It was nothing like my previous works,” she says. The critics would agree.