Lines that never stop speaking: Shishir Bhattacharjee at Kala Kendra

For those of us who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s, Shishir Bhattacharjee was already a household name before we knew him as a "serious" artist. 

His political cartoons, sharp and mischievous, cut through the noise of newspapers with a rare boldness. They made us laugh, but they also made us pause—reminding us that satire could be both playful and devastating.

For many, those cartoons were the gateway, and it was only later that we encountered his wider artistic practice. What is striking about his retrospective 'Drawings' at Kala Kendra is how those same mischievous instincts—his tricks, mistakes, and sly exaggerations—echo throughout his larger body of work, even as it stretches into surreal abstraction, ecological reflection, and philosophical inquiry.

Shishir himself admits this continuity, "In my pictures, this type of fantasy and mistakes abound. There are six fingers too, yes. Many things are wrong, but I manage them in a different way. This kind of mockery, this kind of playful teasing, is present in my works. I am establishing this tactfully."

The word "tact," he reminds us, is his secret policy as an introverted artist—a way of balancing play with critique, humour with seriousness.

The exhibition brings together 94 works spanning from 1990 to 2025, using pen, marker, ink, and acrylic on paper. But as the artist himself explains, most were not created with exhibition in mind: "These were spontaneous drawings with markers, pens and ink on random sketch books and note pads. Across different times, in different situations. The dates on the artworks carry a signature of those times."

Seen together, these fragments form a vast and restless diary of sorts, a chronicle of dreams, memories, and social anxieties rendered through line.

The earliest works on display date back to 1990, when Bhattacharjee illustrated poems for Nodi, a literary magazine. Fish, cattle, women, the head of Durga, and amulets appear in these drawings, echoing both the lyricism of Bangali poetry and the dense visuality of everyday life. They are compact but charged, a reminder that Shishir has always stood at the intersection of text and image, satire and symbol.

By 2011, the tone shifted. 

Larger, cartoon-inflected works emerged, sometimes echoing Western pop influences but always grounded in local humour and critique. This was the era when Shishir was still known first and foremost as a cartoonist, and yet he was already pushing against the limits of the form. 

He once observed, "No matter how much I jump and leap, when it comes onto this four-sided space, it is a composition. Here, I have to surrender." 

The rectangular surface, he insists, is a kind of trap—but also a discipline, a reminder of the human limitations within which imagination must still find expression.

The 2013 exhibition 'Daag Tamasha' demonstrated his appetite for satire on a larger scale. The title itself invoked mockery, and the works unsettled viewers who were not used to art that laughed so brazenly at social and political structures. 

"To whom, Tamasha was disturbing," he recalls of chief guest Murtaja Baseer, who inaugurated that show. But even Baseer admitted to his personal amusement afterwards. More than a decade later, Drawings offers something different: smaller works, quieter in scale, but no less provocative in spirit.

Recent works from 2021 to 2025 dominate much of the exhibition. Created during the pandemic and in its aftermath, they embody both confinement and explosion. 

The drawings carry surreal juxtapositions—scrappy bodies, birds, flowers, and most strikingly, eyes. The recurring eye becomes a mirror of our times: sometimes calm, sometimes piercing, sometimes unsettling. It is the kind of symbol that both looks at us and demands we look at ourselves.

And yet, the mischief never disappears. Even in works that speak of ecological collapse—heads sprouting tree trunks, flames licking at roots, clocks ticking over a barren wasteland—there is a sly humour in the distortions, a refusal to give in entirely to despair. 

"Is there mischief?" he asks rhetorically. "Yes, there is a little mischief."

Visitors to Kala Kendra move through these decades of work with a sense of both intimacy and expansiveness. The gallery has managed to display 94 works without overwhelming the eye, giving each piece room to breathe. 

Many viewers speak of recognition, of seeing their own anxieties and daydreams reflected back at them. Others find humour, relief, even exorcism.

For Bhattacharjee, this is as it should be. "The artwork is mine, but the vision belongs to the viewers," he often says. He even encourages them to respond directly: "Stand in front of my painting, take a pen, and sit down. If you describe it with a little arrangement, anyone can write a wonderful poem." His works, he suggests, are not complete until they spark dialogue—whether in words, laughter, or critique.

At 65, Shishir Bhattacharjee is no longer only the cartoonist who once defined political satire in Bangladesh. He is also a philosopher of the line, a dreamer of ecological futures, a chronicler of the subconscious. Drawings at Kala Kendra is not just a retrospective but a meditation on what it means to draw, to imagine, and to laugh in a world that often feels unbearably heavy.

For those of us who first encountered him through cartoons, the exhibition feels like both a homecoming and a revelation. It shows us that the same hand that once drew the sly caricatures of politicians can also trace the surreal distortions of dreams, the delicate outlines of fish and flowers, the vast cosmic loneliness of human imagination. 

It reminds us that satire is not a detour from art but one of its deepest instincts: the ability to play, to mock, to reveal, and to dream, all with a single restless line.

Culminating later tomorrow, Drawings affirms Shishir Bhattacharjee's place as one of Bangladesh's most vital living artists. It tells us that the line, simple as it may be, is infinite in his hands—capable of holding history, humour, resistance, and wonder all at once.