The Open Studio / Tarun Butta
Tarun Butta
Untitled
His hair turns to bark and the forest takes over
Green light falls through thin skins of paint.
A face rests at the edge, eyes closed like seeds.
His hair darkens and thickens into bark.
The trunk splits into a hundred pale arms.
Leaves hum yellow behind them, close to gold.
You can see the forest through his cheek.
Nothing here is finished growing.
The work
Tarun Butta paints a man's face and a tree as one body. The face sits at the left edge with the eyes closed. His long dark hair flows to the right and becomes a rough trunk. Branches spread out across a field of green and yellow leaves. Butta works in egg tempera on a gessoed panel 122 × 183 cm. He builds the picture from thin layers. The forest shows through the skin. He is drawn to the place "where silence takes on volume."
In the artist’s words
“My work begins a longer inquiry into moments where human identity destabilises in the presence of non-human intelligence and decaying structures. Entities such as trees, ruins and fungi are not symbols but intelligences. They are not metaphors but interlocutors. I am drawn to that threshold where decay and renewal blur, where silence takes on volume.”
- Theme
- Self becoming tree
- Material
- Egg tempera on gessoed panel
- Size
- 122 × 183 cm
- Year
- 2025
- Framed
- No
- About the artist
- Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University
- From
- Gurgaon
- Code
- RC-3955
