Srijon Chowdhury

Srijon Chowdhury’s new series of paintings portrays flowers as the anchors of visual narratives that incorporate people, fantastic beings, insects, and still life objects. Dandelions, poppies, roses, and thistles, among other flowers, take on an electrifying life of their own in scenes of sensuality, wistfulness, and expectation. The artist incorporates a range of painting styles, including a heightened realism, a subtle tonalism, and areas of moody abstraction and patterning, in paintings whose dynamic color themes are as symbolic and allusive as the objects and beings they picture.

With elements of Renaissance religious painting and magic realism, Srijon Chowdhury refigures the world around us into emotive tableaus. He welds the aura of myth to domestic and floral settings, with color engulfing the viewer in transitory moments. “Color affects a person viscerally and quickly. I think about the chakras which begins with crimson that roots us to this reality and this body.” Chowdhury is concerned with the interplay between painting and architectural space. Framed by arches, flowers, and vines, his scenes capture both raw and subdued emotion. Chowdhury’s paintings are windows of reintegration for the natural environment with the self in a time of psychic flux: “I think of my paintings in two ways: Some of them conjure a new and better world; others clarify what is happening around me.”

Srijon Chowdhury (Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1987) lives and works in Portland, OR, and Los Angeles, CA. He holds an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design, and a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Solo exhibitions include: “Srijon Chowdhury,” Foxy Production, New York, NY (2020); “A Divine Dance,” Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA (2019); “Before Dreams,” Antoine Levi, Paris, France; “The Coldest Night,” Upfor, Portland, OR; and “Endings,” The Art Gym, Marylhurst, OR (all 2018). Selected group exhibitions include: "Striving After Wind," Chapter NY, New York, NY (2021); "Severed Symbol," Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; “Barely Furtive Pleasures,” Nir Altman, Munich, Germany (both 2020); "Cicatrices," VO Curations, London, UK;"Portraits," Foxy Production, New York, NY (both 2019); “Swamp Thing vs Man Thing,” Et Al,San Fransisco, CA (2018); “February,” Roberta Pelan, Toronto, Canada; and “Water & Dreams,” The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (both 2017).