Srijon Chowdhury: The Garden

Klowden Mann is very pleased to present The Garden, the gallery's first solo show by Los Angeles-based artist Srijon Chowdhury. The exhibition features oil paintings on linen, primarily large in scale, depicting deeply crimson-toned, highly immersive floral fields. The paintings invoke the sensation of myth on a felt level, intended to act in the space between knowledge and emotion, creating access to the present moment as part of a larger, intuited, history. In addition, Chowdhury will offer four distinct paintings in the gallery project room, entitled Four Thoughts Surrounding the Desire for Love and Immortality. The exhibition will be on view from April 26th through June 7th, with a reception for the artist on Saturday April 26th, from 6 to 8pm, and an artist talk on Saturday May 31st at 4pm.

In the main gallery, Chowdhury's fields of flowers are bold in moments but also softened, using representational imagery to move away from concepts of an original referent, or objective truth. The paintings explore an experiential idea of history through the use of mirroring, and altered repetitions of dense, visceral imagery. Chowdhury invokes repetition to examine the changes and removal that necessarily occur with each re-telling of history: a concept rooted in the experience of overlap and disjunction. With each painting, and each retelling, Chowdhury presents time as collapsed and malleable, and the creation of myth is recognized as existing in the present as much as the past. The imagery (which invokes a sense of the mythological) and the immersive scale of the work reflects upon the ubiquitous societal importance placed upon origin myths.

The works in the project room break away from the unification of the floral fields, with Chowdhury offering artifacts from an experience within the myth, proposing context to its existence.

Srijon Chowdhury was born in Bangkok, Thailand in 1987, and received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2013. He has exhibited in Los Angles at Klowden Mann, Launch Gallery and Helen Bolsky Gallery, in Miami at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, and at The Gallery in Dhaka, Bangladesh.