Peter Daglish exhibition in Calcutta

This month sees Peter Daglish in India for a joint exhibition with Amal Ghosh entitled "Vitreous Enamels & Linocut Prints". The show - which features linocuts by Peter and enamels by Amal Ghosh - is at the Ganges Art Gallery in Calcutta. It opened on January 14 and runs until January 31.

Ganges Art Gallery: Exhibition guide includes images
Review - from Kolkata Mirror

In its notes about the exhibition the Gallery writes:

Peter Daglish’s incisive linocuts hark back to the graphics of Hogarth and Daumier. Linocuts are relief print produced in a manner similar to woodcut.

The wooden block has a thin layer of linoleum which can be cut away in any direction to produce a raised surface that can be inked and printed, producing either monochromatic or multi-coloured images.

Daglish makes incredible use of the medium’s strong graphical potential to exploit the bold patterns which are integral to his work. His use of colour, while exuberant in its own terms, also allows for shading and texturing the image.

Daglish’s linocuts brim with the fineness and foibles of the human condition and are both perceptive and funny. He is able to explore the earthy and quotidian as a reproach to the spiritual and a negation of the ideal and is able to perceive incongruous relationships and express them in a pointed manner.

His women are celebrations of pure energy: stylized, curvilinear and more than faintly kinky. Their sensuous lips and extravagant hairdos show the artist’s taste for precise detail and stylized though highly idiosyncratic motifs.

In what they encompass or allude to, these works transcend the beautiful, the comic, the grotesque or even the quest for objectivity. They are a relentless scrutiny of the world ranging from scathing social commentary to opulent ornamentalism. On all scores, though, the artistic attention is contemplative rather than confrontational.