She is a textile designer from Paris and he a Bengali lawyer from London. Both meet at Kolkata’s Gyan Manch to watch an English play staged by the popular theatre troupe Theatrecian. Sparks fly off and a new bond of chemistry is forged between the two. This was exactly four winters back in 2006 when Anais and Abhishek found love
and the like-minded synergy worked wonders to establish a platform that would promote young talents in various fields of arts and crafts. As a result, the Calcutta Arts Club was set up with the sole purpose of giving fruition to their common passion of woven dreams. “It’s an art for art’s sake creation and am happy that from taking baby steps to emerging gloriously into leaps and bounds, our organisation is in good shape,” says Abhishek Basu delightedly, who is also associated as a legal consultant to the reputed Victor Moses & Company.
Sharing their passion for arts, the couple has launched a portal to tap promising new talents with great potential from across six continents. Having developed a keen eye for aesthetics and art via multiple experiences and exposure yielding from diverse backgrounds and cultures, the husband-wife duo now play complementary roles to each other in their talent-searching expedition. Anais, who decided to make India her home on her first visit to the country, had studied fashion and art from schools in Paris, while Abhishek visited various art colleges, meeting young artists and exchanging a barrage of creative ideas with them. More so, he was always fascinated by the contemporary works of artists globally.
The principal objective of Calcutta Arts Club is to discover and bolster the persevering efforts of the upcoming, original talents. As they travelled through Europe, they started their first travelling show titled The Bengal Trail in 2008, introducing the modern-day blooming buds across the artscape from Bengal. A bunch of such prospective talents had their creative collections been exhibited in alternative spaces in Milan, Barcelona, London, Paris and Singapore and were well received by the audience. Aspiring to be an international arts forum, the Calcutta Arts Club has already tripped between Europe and Asia. “I admit that we both share a penchant for hunting out hidden talents with a dash of novelty to deliver at their disposal but honestly, no well-meaning endeavour succeeds without the support of a long-lasting chain of discerning connoisseurs, art collectors, eagle-eyed curators, art enthusiasts and patrons. It is on our wish-list, therefore, to diversify into other disciplines of art as well and branch out into ancillary sectors like photography, designing, performing arts, audiovisuals under the canopy of Calcutta Arts Club in the near future. We thus intend to carry on with our mission to mould talented greenhorns into expert individuals from different corners of the world,” she says.
Contemplating on his brainchild, Abhishek says: “The pressure to perform here is immense, because art is like religion in Kolkata. So, we definitely needed to prove our mettle here. We plan to spread our wings further with other flourishing spheres of creativity. For instance, a photographic exhibition will be held in Milan, wherein we’ll be showcasing the works of young shutterbug Bibhash Bhattacharjee. Besides being a photographic whizkid, this lensman happens to be the son of the deceased painter Bikash Bhattacharjee, who was one of the pioneering leaders from the august league of Bengal masters. This apart, young offbeat filmmakers with keen on out-of-the-box scripts and designers with cutting-edge fashion sense and knack for funky interior decors are also on the anvil for consideration. Art as a subject has a broader spectrum. It is multifarious and blessed with a motley of varied genres.”
With a website called Calcuttaartsclub.com to boot, Abhishek confirms that orders are delivered to any part of the world within a short span of seven to 10 working days to the prospective purchasers. “We get regular site visits from Russia, America, Siberia, Asia and the far European belts. Lebanon is an exotic source and we are weighing chances to set our foot in West Asian territory too. Besides, we are eyeing our first trip to New York in the US. We started our voyage from Milan as this Italian city is the richest, wealthiest and slickest art hub in Europe. My law firm clients are also based out of that particular zone in Italy. Hence, a fibre of familiarity emanated while exploring that part of the world,” apprises Abhishek, who celebrated his maiden wedding anniversary recently.
“We have just completed a year of our togetherness and the seed of our labour-of-love, which were initially sown in far Europe in Spain in the form of an art exhibition, germinated into a healthy sensitive sapling. And after traversing across the Eurasian map, it did touch down in India with a formal launch in Chennai, followed with Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi and finally in Kolkata, our hometown,” gushes Anais, summarising the whole creative sojourn.
“We sold more than half of our specimens there, including the prestigious arts fair hosted in Singapore in the first week of November in 2010. The price-band was affordably pegged between `30,000 to `60,000.
The idea was to obtain a toehold in the art-industry with a brigade of young offshoots showcasing their latent skills and finesse,” explains Priyanjoli Basu, Abhishek’s sister, who handled the media relations for the Kolkata launchpad to make the exhibition a success.
“I just returned from London after three months and was busy putting up a show propped with Bengal’s artworks at a Nottinghill art gallery there,” she says.
In the offing is a travelling exhibition to be mounted up around Europe again at a stretch from March to July this year. Back home, two more cities will be added onto The Bengal Trail list: Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. An eclectic array of 30 works has been so far exhibited with each of the Indian cities getting its fresh share of collection, thus adding up the total output to 150 pieces. “All five featured artists, namely Partha Sarathi Pan, Madhuchanda Majumder, Pradip Das, Debabrata Hazra and Subir Dey have burnt the midnight oil for the past year-and-a-half to wrap up their assignment,” reveals Abhishek.
Opening new doorways of possibility to the amateur artists abroad, the next plum project up the sleeve of Calcutta Arts Club is “to bring in the bevy of foreign young artists from the West to India and discover the aesthetic ambience of art and crafts here. But having said that, we surely want to land in every corner of the terra-firma to cull out the unsung heroes,” Anais says.