Artist Spotlight — Ishita Banerjee
Artist, dreamer, abstract expressionist, Ishita trained as a classical, fine artist, with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts (BFA) degree in Applied Arts and a Master’s in Fine Arts (MFA) in Communication Design from The College of Art, University of Delhi, India.
With a specialization in visual narrative, she graduated top of her class in the University of Delhi, Master’s of Fine Arts (MFA) program. She was also awarded the Emerging Artist award by the British Council in India in 1995 for her artwork The Kiss.
As a visual artist, she made a career in the field of broadcast design, book publishing, and as a lecturer at the Delhi College of Art, teaching the undergraduate program of color theory and design aesthetics.
She moved to Canada in 2010, and since then, has successfully launched her full-time art career under the brand name Soul Curry Art.
With a thriving art practice, She’s proud to be represented by art galleries like Gallea in Canada and Design Art Concepts, Artsy in the USA, and Faceartnet in the UK. She also has licensing agreements for a selection of her artworks all over North America, Europe, and Asia, sold as prints through iCanvas, Noir Gallery, Image Conscious, and Mixtiles. A selection of her art prints can also be purchased at West Elm Montreal.
Working from her studio in Montreal, Canada, she continues to create and sell her original artworks and modern abstract prints through her own website www.soulcurryart.com. Recently making her foray into the NFT space, she has been very successful at selling her NFT’s on some of the biggest NFT marketplaces. To date, she is the highest-selling South Asian female artist in the NFT space. Her genesis piece Shiva was sold within a few days along with a number of other pieces already in the secondary market.
Her art is an assimilation of her life experiences, largely influenced by her relationship to impatience and impulsivity. Merging imagination and memory to create vivid and bold abstracts, people, faces, and non-traditional portraiture, rendered in strong color, motifs, and details.
Working with a variety of mediums like acrylics, inks, watercolors, pen, and markets, she paints and draws intuitively, adding, mixing, editing, and layering color upon the color that drives the process forward. The resulting works are emotive, tactile, and experiential.
Human interactions, emotions, moods, and feelings inspire her work. She loves abstracting these feelings and associations. Depicting people and nature in their tempestuous forms plays a big role in her work. Actively seeking out gnarled, broken, rocky, cyclic, layered, and grungy aspects of nature, she tries to find the beauty in the bizarre, the unexplained.
Through her art, she strives to give tangible forms to complex emotions like grief, longing, loss, love, suffering. The interplay of human relationships, whether with one’s own self or with others is a recurrent theme in the pieces she makes.
Threading lines, textures and markings in her work tell the story of the passage of time, the inter-connections of forms, both tangible and abstract.
She is deeply inspired by the Cubist style of art, unconstrained, outside the lines, breaking free of traditional rules of perspectives, and the role of interpretational abstracts that are as transient as human feelings.
Outside of her daily art practice, she is a community builder. She believes in art education, art transcends borders, and art as a universal language.
She runs three successful clubs on Clubhouse working to connect and build a community of artists and collectors in the new space where the lines between the various forms of art begin to blur.
NFT Platform Links
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Email: soulcurryart@gmail.com
