The Frame — formed by a group of friends in 1993 after they graduated from art school — celebrated its upcoming 30th anniversary with a show at Gallery Charubasona from August 12-September 20. There were 13 participants, but the exhibition had no theme holding it together.

Sumitabha Pal’s sculptures were quite startling for they were the likenesses of hands, either up to the wrist or with part of the arm intact. These were terracotta hands with silver foil for their skin, defamiliarising these extremities of a human body’s upper limbs and turning them into prehensile and aggressive appendages. They were as disturbing as Rameshwar Broota’s video where hands take on a life of their own.

A swollen head denotes unwarranted pride. A Bengali adage substitutes the head for a finger but means the same thing. Jayanta Bhattacharya may have had this in mind when he created his bronze sculptures depicting inflated balloons (in one case he uses a latex surgical glove, picture) with a tiny, pathetic looking body attached to it. The resultant forms look quite bizarre and astonishing and expose the foolishness and absurdity of an unreasonably large amount of pride, particularly when there is no reason at all for such a temperament. Soumitra Kar’s tempera on board paintings, titled Nabanna, are inspired by folk rituals and designs, which the artist has witnessed during his extensive wanderings in rural Bengal. A motif that is recurrent in all these brightly coloured paintings is the third eye, reminiscent of a similar symbol used in ancient Egypt to ward off evil.

Debasish Samanta is employed as a textile designer and this influences his art. In his gouache work on handmade paper titled Mindscape IV, for which he used graphite for drawing and mark making, he fell back on the experience of walking through deserted city streets at night while a street dog let out a volley of yelps in despair. Subhra Kumar Banerjee displayed colourful caricatures of the male human face titled Urbanity-05.