Terrain.art and Arjun Sawhney has announced an exhibition featuring artworks of West Bengal born artist, Lalu Prasad Shaw — certified using Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs). Conceptualised as the first edition of Masters, the show features a comprehensive selection of Shaw’s works that hold a significant provenance. Like many of his contemporaries such as Jamini Roy, Shaw’s artistic language throughout his career has predominantly been figurative. His stylised representations encompass diverse subjects and objects staged meticulously in a pictorial frame. Musing on the multiple facets of the Bengali middle class, Shaw’s paintings dramatise the everyday life of people he observed in his immediate surroundings. His unique approach to composition resonates both with Kalighat pats and early studio photography. While primarily a painter, Shaw is also an accomplished printmaker, having studied the techniques of intaglio and lithography.
Opening today, Masters will be on display online on Terrain.art until 31st July 2021. The exhibition will be showcasing a careful selection of 27 recent paintings by Lalu Prasad Shaw. Shaw is the first Indian modern artist to showcase paintings with registered non-fungible tokens. NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens, are unique digital assets that can be used as individual identifiers for physical assets on a blockchain, allowing for authenticated ownership and facilitating a transparent and tamper-proof transfer of digital ownership each time the works are resold in an effort to protect the artist’s future legacy.
About Lalu Prasad Shaw
With a career spanning over six decades, Lalu Prasad Shaw’s works have been exhibited at various prestigious institutions nationally and internationally. His works have been exhibited by the CIMA (Kolkata), Dhoomimal Art Centre (New Delhi), Gallerie Splash (Gurgaon), Gallery 7 (Mumbai), Galerie 88 (Kolkata) and Akar Prakar (Kolkata) among others. His works were shown at the second British Biennale in London in 1970, two Norwegian Print Biennales in 1974 and 1978, the seventh Paris Biennale in 1971, and the second Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh in 1984. He received the National Award for Graphic Art in 1971 and the award for Graphic Art and Drawing in 1981.
Curated by: Deepa Nair
Photographs: Courtesy Terrain.art
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