Images travel. They are reproduced, remembered, borrowed and transformed. For Kundan Mondal, painting begins with images circulating from art history, mythology, popular culture, and everyday life. Figures from European sculpture, ancient Egyptian tomb paintings and vernacular traditions appear alongside animals, landscapes and found objects. Removed from their original settings, these images are fragmented and brought into unexpected relationships.
Trained as a painter in Kolkata and Baroda, and later at Wimbledon College of Arts in London, Mondal draws on traditions ranging from Kalighat painting and the murals of Ajanta to Western fresco. Working with natural pigments and khadiya mitti, he builds surfaces in which forms emerge through layers of colour and texture, sometimes clearly visible, elsewhere dissolving into the ground. His paintings can resemble weathered walls or archaeological fragments, as if the images have survived the passage of time.
In Pieta (2026), a devotional sculpture from a Kochi antique market is paired with an eighteenth-century Ecuadorian Christ Child, bringing infancy and death together in the same image. In Santhal Family (2025), Mondal responds to Ramkinkar Baij's celebrated sculpture, drawing on its sense of movement and migration. Yet his imagination is as firmly rooted in the present as in the past. In Cupboard (2026), a specimen cabinet from Baroda becomes the starting point for a composition in which birds, animals, religious sculpture, and still-life painting coexist, blurring the distinction between the sacred and the ordinary.
Mondal describes his practice as anti-history painting. Rather than rejecting history, he questions the certainty of a single narrative or a fixed interpretation. Images retain traces of their origins while acquiring meanings that could not have existed in their original contexts.
The exhibition takes its title from Mondal's The Painter (2025), in which Vincent van Gogh's Head of a Skeleton with a Burning Cigarette (1886) reappears alongside a pale standing figure, an artist's palette and intersecting planes of colour. The painting brings together images and objects from different contexts, offering an entry point into Mondal's practice of borrowing, reworking, and transforming visual histories.
