Artist Subrat Kumar Beherat Blends Mythology And Material Existence In A Fascinating Manner

Much like his other works, Stories from my Grandmother (2018),  by artist Subrat Kumar Behera, straddles the space between imagination and reality. According to Behera, the work harks back to his grandmother’s fantastical tales. In fact, the painting is an amalgamation of these wonderful stories, which blend mythology and material existence, from his own childhood.

Imagination and reality clash violently in this canvas, and  that is what lends a nightmarish quality to the phantasmagorical vision. As Behera suggests, the painting painfully evokes how we are hurting Mother Nature in the name of progress. Rural and urban spaces bleed into each other here, reversing the ‘natural order’ of things. For Behera, it is the village that has become an oddity in the rapidly-modernizing world of concrete around it. Seen through this lens, the artist reflects, it is as though their ancestral home, deep in the forest, has now become a myth, which is trespassing into the harsh, unrelenting reality of modernity.