Sunil Madhav Sen (1910 - 1979)

Mixed Media on Paper

16 x 12 Inches

Signed - Lower Left

Year - 1959(Indistinct)

By the later decades of his practice, Sunil Madhav Sen’s lines had moved far from the formal portraits of his early career in Bankura and Kolkata. This work shows his instinctive approach to form, shaped by early memories of Rarh Bengal’s folk art and his study of European modernists like Picasso and Klee.

Sen often softened oil and gouache washes with turpentine, layering them over paper or reused board, building almost textile-like surfaces that echo the craft traditions he first admired as a boy watching village sculptors at work.

Here, his forms feel part mask, part folk toy, part pure abstraction; capturing the energy that defined Sen’s visual vocabulary: local clay and rural ritual transposed into modernist gesture.