Posted on 11 October 2026:

🎨 #YathraCanvas

Art in a Frame

DIPENDRANATH PAL’S SOLO SHOW AT NEW DELHI

Dipendranath Pal’s Palimpsest of the Soul turns Kolkata’s ageing façades into meditations on time and the self

What happens when a wall becomes a memory, and a crack becomes an incision?

Kolkata-based renowned artist Dipendranath Pal (b. 1977) finds his answers in the weathered streets of North Kolkata: crumbling cornices, shuttered windows, peeling verandahs and walls softened by monsoon rain. He doesn’t document the city. He excavates its emotional presence, turning layers of paint and decay into abstract reflections on memory.

The title comes from the palimpsest, a surface where earlier writing lingers beneath the new. For artist Dipendranath Pal, it speaks to both the city and the human mind, each carrying the marks of history, repair, neglect and a life lived.

His materials carry that story too: acrylic, impasto, sawdust and a tamarind-seed binder traditionally used by artisans. The result is architecture that feels almost like skin.

Curated by renowned Georgina Maddox, the exhibition opens on 15 October, with Dr. Sanjeev Kishore Gautam, Director General, National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi, as Chief Guest.

“Pal’s paintings do not ask us to look at a building; they ask us to experience a surface that has lived,” says curator Georgina Maddox. “The wall becomes a body carrying scars, memories, erasures and remnants of time.”

Working across paper and canvas, Dipendranath Pal layers acrylic and impasto with materials gathered close to home: sawdust from neighbourhood sawmills, glue, and ground tamarind seed. Known in Bengali as Kai-beej or Tentul-beej, this powder is a natural binder long used by artisans, including those of Kolkata’s Kumartuli. Sawdust carries the residue of wood and labour, while tamarind seed links each canvas to the city’s artisanal heritage.

For artist Dipendranath Pal, the surface is never just a background. It is a threshold between the visible and the buried, recognition and abstraction, memory and forgetting.

“I am less interested in depicting old Kolkata than in understanding what its surfaces make me feel,” says Pal. “I try to translate that sensation rather than reproduce the architecture itself.”

In his world, paint becomes skin, a crack becomes a wound, and dust settles like sediment. The paintings invite slow looking. At first they read as texture and colour, then fragments emerge: a faded façade, an opening, a mark. The viewer drifts between seeing and remembering.

“There is a quiet tension in Pal’s work between decay and endurance. His surfaces appear fragile, but they also resist disappearance. What has peeled away reveals another layer; what seems broken becomes another form of expression.”

“A city is never only its buildings,” adds Maddox.

“It is also the memories, emotions and histories that accumulate around them.”

Ultimately, Palimpsest of the Soul asks what remains when time has altered the visible world, and how those remnants continue to live within us.

📍 Triveni Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam, 205 Tansen Marg, Mandi House, New Delhi – 110001
🗓 15–24 October 2026 / 🕚 11 AM – 8 PM daily

🎨 #YathraCanvas