Sarbari Roy Chowdhury

Sarbari Roy Chowdhury was born in 1933 in Ulpur, (now Bangladesh). He graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata in 1956. He further studied under sculptors Prodosh Dasgupta and Sankho Chaudhuri at the M.S. University, Baroda. Between 1960 and 1962, he served as the Head of the Department of Sculpture at the Indian Art College, Kolkata.

Chowdhury’s works, although pictorial in nature, are also largely abstract in their style. This was probably due to his travels to the Academia de Belle Arti, Florence in 1962, where he met Giacometti and Henry Moore in person, who along with Sankho Chaudhuri had an undeniable impact on his style. His sculptures feature a unique mix of the academic realism of the East and the more innovative cubism and abstraction of the West. One of his deepest inspirations came from Hindustani classical music. He felt that the abstraction of music can be expressed only through another abstract art form. Music influenced him, and its reaction in his subconscious drives his creative activity which resulted a visual form of music. 

Chowdhury won several awards including the Gagan-Abani Puraskar from Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan in 2004, and the Abanindra Puraskar from the Government of West Bengal in 2005. Over the years he has exhibited his works at several group and solo shows in India. One of the last exhibitons was a retrospective titled ‘Sensibility Objectified – The Sculptures of Sarbari Roy Chowdhury’ held in 2009 in New Delhi.

Chowdhury passed away in 2012.