Sanat Kar Sanat
Kar was born in Calcutta in 1935. He joined he Government College of Art and Craft at
Calcutta in 1950 after matriculation. In 1952, along with fellow-students Kar formed a
group called The Artists' Circle. He graduated from the art college in 1955. Held teaching
jobs first at Calcutta Boy's School and then in 1978 at Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati in
Santiniketan.
He worked for a while in Dilip Dasgupta's studio in the mid- '50s and
played a major role in the formation of the Society of Contemporary Artists in 1960. Kar
began experimenting with etching in the early '60s. It was a self-taught process. His
fruitful explorations of material for plates arose from the need to cut costs. Zinc was
becoming too costly a material and so he worked first with wood blocks, then moved on to
plywood and finally, Sun mica and engraving on cardboard. The interesting feature of his
work was that he married successfully the character of work on a metal plate to his wood
blocks without sacrificing the character of wood. From the late '80s began painting with
rempra.
Kar's figurations have, an innocence and a feeling of poetry. A
dreamlike quality pervades his work. It is in his texturisations that he achieves great
mastery. The shimmering colors. the grainy surfaces, the mottled, scratched, doodled lines
create their own visual magic.
Kar lives and works in Calcutta
