Sculptures & Objects

Art meets Artificial Intelligence

Pratiti Basu Sarkar

The Dali Museum in Florida, USA, curated an inventive exhibition on Dali using his art and Artificial Intelligence (AI). The museum did this project to give visitors an opportunity to learn more about Dali—his life and work—from the person who knew him best—Dali himself. Cutting-edge AI techniques were used. It employed machine learning to create a version of Dali’s likeness, resulting in an almost uncanny and ghostly resurrection of Dali.

Visitors could interact with the lifelike Dali on several screens throughout the museum. The technology enabled visitors to experience Dali’s personality and the museum’s collection of his art.

There are dozens of museums in America that are now experimenting with AI. In 2017, the Pinacoteca of São Paulo partnered with IBM to create an AI audio guide that allowed visitors to talk with paintings.

The AI that creates art is called “Generative AI.” It is a system that is “trained” on different available data systems, such as information from history and art, politics, literature, social studies, etc. The systems have already been created by humans and so exist and are operational. Human engineers build generative AI and train it by making it learn from different data systems—so AI is fed and grown by people.

Internationally, many artists use AI as a new tool to augment their creative process, explore new ideas, and go beyond human limitations. Artists use this trained generative AI by giving it prompts, based upon which AI then creates original artworks. The creation of AI is a long process that involves human history, technological engineers, and artists, but it is made by humans.

Reading up about AI and Art made me think about AI. It can write a poem, provide tips on cooking the best dosa and sambhar, but when it comes to mathematics, OpenAI and ChatGPT have sometimes stumbled over complex reasoning.

There are complexities in art—social issues of, say, racial/caste bias. There are ethical challenges, and one wonders how AI represents historical and cultural personalities and events. Also, AI can be manipulated, and it can also be made to be manipulative. Art, on the other hand, is open to interpretation.

The question this raises on AI-generated art is about creativity and “authorship” or “artist.” Who is the “creator”? Is it humans, since the data systems it creates and produces are made by people. Is it the engineers? Or… is it still the “artist” since something is being made? Or is it the “team”? Will this collaboration between man and machine alter our thinking about society? Or do we need “human art” to do that?

What if M.F. Husain met AI? Whose perspective would be presented? The factor of bias is a criticism of AI—the ethical challenges in how AI represents historical and cultural figures. Also, complex reasoning is a stumbling point. I had the privilege of knowing him. I think he would look at AI-generated art with curiosity; he would not dismiss it, but he might be sceptical, since Husain believed that the paint and brush showed the presence of the artist and the artist’s thinking, and that this sense of the artist’s presence was critical when we looked at art. Because art, to be art, has to be reflective and exchange a quiet conversation between the viewer and the artist or the artwork.

The benefits of AI make the challenges seem surmountable. AI is interactive, it can be widely available, and mostly free of admission charges. It brings viewers closer to experiencing art. Art becomes more shared and, more importantly, AI would make art more democratic. Technology makes participation more widely available because it gives more accessibility rights. The physical distance between a person and a museum or gallery is no longer a block in the pathway.

Art has historically been perceived to be leaning towards elitism—that it is for the well-to-do and intellectual—and not for the less privileged. AI, because it brings art into spaces outside museums and galleries, makes encountering art and seeing it proletarian.

Historically, art was done to show realities—landscapes, portraits—more so before the invention of the camera and photography. It presented the actuals without any commentary. Contemporary art might show reality, but a lot of the art we see in these times seem to express opinions and one can only be either Pro-Left and Anti-Right or vice versa. The other word for it is political correctness.

AI can also be made to show opinions depending on the inputs added in its construction, but because it is available to the wide world and can be deleted, it isn’t shown to be a universal and one-sided truth. AI’s pontifications are not to preach; they are done to present AI with a conscience, to make it seem “human” versus being a digital fiction. Yet, it is the still image people take more seriously. Our brains are biased against animation because we connect it to illustrations and comics and see them as seemingly put-together.

AI generated art invites the viewer to be involved and immediate with their response. Paintings, drawings, sculptures which are made by hand also invites the viewer to step in but not necessarily interact with the art physically or immediately.

AI generated works use the art language of image making but don’t require us to be immediate. Art created by human hand also has the factor of permanence and can live (if looked after) forever. AI generated art is about continual change and varied renditions. “Forever” isn’t a word in AI’s dictionary.

Performance Art at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, India, in September 2025, by Tejwasi Yadav

Artist Tejwasi Yadav speaks during a performance art show at Birla Academy of Art and Culture in Kolkata, India.

Ranen Ayan Dutt - the man who breathed art into commerce

Shiv Nath Sen

The art of indefinability is how I see art. There is nothing art cannot encompass. “ A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, wrote Keats. Is that art? Probably. The “ thing” could be anything. There is no rule book. From my neighbour’s kitsch tea kettles to collages with waste paper by Shakila Sheik or a vintage Maybach making heads turn, art is in the eye of the beholder. Art is in the high street storefronts or in my friend’s finely styled duo-tone shoes.

The late Ranen Ayan Dutt, painter par excellence who worked for the advertising industry made a fine art of advertising with his stellar creations of calendar paintings, exhibition pavilions, show windows and brand campaigns. He said, “I work for commerce but I am a pure artist, not a commercial artist.”

I believe anything which fires the imagination is art. And it can easily gatecrash the hallowed bounds of an art gallery with panache without having to be a a Ganesh Halui or a Rembrandt. How else will you explain the presence of Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup cans and the display of Hawkins Futura pressure cookers in MoMa?

Calendar art of Ranen Ayan Dutt, presenting ancient inkwells of India. The inkwell, photographed from Shubho Thakur’s collection, is a photograph. An imagined period picture of a woman of Rajasthani nobility, is seen writing a letter to her lover.Client was Shaw Wallace. Theme: Inkwells of India.

A piece of art history on Goddess Durga. Shared by Antiart Gallery

About Artist

Chhatrapati Dutta

Chhatrapati Dutta is one of those rare maverick youthful artists whose works breathe intelligence, grace, and quiet rebellion in equal measure. Trained at the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata, and Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan—with further studies at the University of Athens—Dutta’s journey reflects a seamless blend of classical mastery and contemporary curiosity. His art speaks in whispers and echoes, layering memory, history, and emotion in muted tones and textured surfaces. Whether through collage, drawing, or installation, his works capture the pulse of Kolkata—the chaos, the nostalgia, the dreamscape beneath the dust. Dutta’s images are not mere representations but contemplations, unfolding stories of post-colonial identity, consumerism, and the fragile poetry of urban life. As Principal of the Government College of Art & Craft and a founding member of Khoj Kolkata, he shapes not only art but thought—mentoring young minds to look, feel, and question. In every gesture of his line, in every fragment he composes, there is a dialogue between past and present, chaos and calm. Chhatrapati Dutta’s art doesn’t just hang on walls—it lingers, it hums, it stays with you long after you’ve walked away.

Ayesha Dutt

Ayesha Dutt is a visual artist, based in Kolkata, India, specialising in abstract painting and ceramic sculpture.

Both her paintings and sculptures deal largely with her own personal struggles with battling Bipolar disorder II, and navigating her way around it. Her colours ranging from ecstatic reds and pinks, portraying the mania end of the bipolar spectrum, take an unexpected turn with more mellow hues of blue and green as they traverse towards the depression end of the spectrum. Exploring both the darkness and the thrill that coexist within her.

In 2023, Ayesha began embroidering on her abstract canvas paintings, using “kantha” embroidery, a form of embroidery indigenous to Bengal where she is from. Kantha has been in her life in the form of the three women who are responsible for bringing her up, namely her mother, maternal grandmother and their house help, fondly known as Manu Didi. They are her inspiration.

Growing up with a single mother who was working, Ayesha found herself at her grandmother’s house every day after school, waiting eagerly to hear tales of foreboding, faraway lands. Her grandmother stitched her 2 silk kantha blankets with scenes from her favourite Enid Blyton novels, which she keeps away safely in a moth proofed almirah. When Ayesha went away to attend the design programme at NID Ahmedabad, their household help Manu didi stitched her a cotton kantha blanket that she wraps herself in till this day. The third and most significant contributor to her inspiration is her mother, a force to be reckoned with, who adorns herself in silk kantha clothes. These pieces pay homage to them.

Malia Bhattacharya

My practice begins with silence — the kind that holds memory, pain, and fragments of stories that could not be spoken. I work with materials that carry traces of life: thread, wax, cloth, ash, bones, and earth. These are not merely objects to me, but extensions of the body — witnesses of time, emotion, and decay.

Through layering, burning, stitching, and embedding, I try to make visible what often remains hidden: the internal scars, the residues of love, loss, and survival. Much of my work emerges from an interest in how memory inhabits matter — how the body and the landscape remember beyond words.

The recurring motifs of sealed forms, wounds, and fragile threads speak of containment and release, of what lies beneath the surface of silence. My process is both ritualistic and intuitive — an act of assembling and healing. I am drawn to the tension between fragility and endurance, between what is preserved and what disintegrates.

In these works, I do not attempt to tell a linear story. Instead, I offer spaces where memory, body, and material can coexist — fractured, tactile, and alive.

Sujata Pandit

Breaking away from the expected, Sujata Pandit’s art emerges from a world where imagination and emotion interlace — where the personal becomes mythic, and the everyday is charged with wonder. A postgraduate in Visual Arts from Rabindra Bharati University and recipient of the Junior Fellowship in Visual Arts, Pandit continuously reinvents her language, refusing to be confined by medium or manner.

In her own words, “Storm water falls with chunks of ice — I’ve even heard it rains fish. Just like hailstorms, there are fish storms. I wonder, what if… boats, their boatmen, river water, birds, nests, beds, lanterns — what if everything came pouring down with the rain? What if human hearts rained down too — those hearts soaked in sorrow, weighed with melancholy…”

Her process mirrors this poetic turbulence. “The streak, the colour drifts away like a rebellious girl,” she writes, describing a practice where intuition leads form, and control yields to chance. In this flux, new bonds are born — what she calls “a fairytale” — between artist and image, feeling and form.

Sujata Pandit’s work resists boundaries and easy definitions. It is lyrical yet grounded, tender yet disruptive — a living, breathing dialogue between inner worlds and shifting realities. Through her art, she continues to break new ground, crafting a visual language that is at once meditative and insurgent.

Sujata Pandit

Breaking away from the expected, Sujata Pandit’s art emerges from a world where imagination and emotion interlace — where the personal becomes mythic, and the everyday is charged with wonder. A postgraduate in Visual Arts from Rabindra Bharati University and recipient of the Junior Fellowship in Visual Arts, Pandit continuously reinvents her language, refusing to be confined by medium or manner.

He graduated with Honours in Bengali Literature in 2015 before steering towards formal art education, completing his BFA and MFA in Painting from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata (2019 and 2021). This synthesis of literary and visual awareness infuses his work with narrative depth and conceptual subtlety.

Pramanik’s art emerges from an alternative way of seeing, where the familiar turns into the unexpected. Often using unusual materials such as cement and other unconventional surfaces, he explores the balance between fragility and strength, material and meaning. Each work becomes an act of discovery — a tactile dialogue between thought, form, and texture.

Recipient of several prestigious honours including the Jogen Chowdhury Centre for Arts Scholarship, 100 Artists Grant Award (Switzerland), Charukala Award, Emami Art Grant Award, and the Rabindra Bharati University Annual Exhibition Award, Pramanik has exhibited widely in India and abroad. His works have featured in the CIMA Award Show (2022), Birla Academy Annual Exhibition, “Abir India,” “The India Story,” and the “Art Family” Online Solo Exhibition.

In an age of easy repetition, Tufan Pramanik’s art stands apart for its quiet conviction and thoughtful innovation — continually pushing back boundaries and inviting viewers to look beyond the obvious, and deeper into the unseen.

Alakananda Sengupta

Born in Kolkata in 1963, Alakananda Sengupta shapes her world in clay moulding dreams, endurance, and the silent ache of womanhood into form.

A graduate of Rabindra Bharati University in sculpture, she turns terracotta into something almost breathing staining it with colour before the fire seals its soul.

Her works are meditations on the world of women their unseen battles, their grace under weight, their luminous strength that rises from within.

Through every curve and crack of earth, she speaks of dignity reclaimed of pain transformed into resilience.

Recipient of the Birla Academy’s Best Sculpture Award (2003),

and honoured by the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce and Nirman, Alakananda has exhibited widely from Art Heritage in Delhi to Serendipity and Women Sculptors of India in Kolkata.

Umesh jana

In Umesh Jana’s world, the landscape trembles between creation and collapse. His paintings are poetic excavations of a changing environment — where human ambition and industrial growth rewrite the terrain of memory and survival. Working with acrylic, charcoal, and ink on paper, he layers spontaneity with structure, allowing stains, erasures, and burnt tones to become metaphors for time’s slow corrosion.

Cranes, skeletal frameworks, and deserted terrains reappear as symbols of both progress and loss. Figures often stand solitary, as if suspended between what was once organic and what has become mechanical — bearing witness to a world in flux. Through fractured surfaces and subdued hues, Jana reveals not just a place but a state of mind — a psychological landscape shaped by transition and endurance.

Born in 1986, Jana holds an MFA in Painting (First Class First) from the University of Kalyani and a BFA in Painting (First Class) from the College of Visual Art, Kolkata. His early training in batik and fabric painting at Lamartiniere SEOMP Society added to his command over texture and layering, which now defines his practice.

Since 2007, Jana has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, including Lalit Kala Akademi, Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Rabindra Bharati University, and the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. His works have also featured in significant group shows at Jehangir Art Gallery, Academy of Fine Arts, and Harrington Street Art Centre, marking him as one of the distinctive voices of his generation.

Recognition has followed steadily — he received the Birla Academy of Art & Culture Award (2023), the West Bengal State Akademi Award (2023), and the AIFACS Best Painting Cash Award (2022) — acknowledgements of a vision that is both introspective and contemporary.

Jana continues to work from his studio at the Lalit Kala Akademi Regional Centre, Kolkata, his canvases collected in Kolkata, New Delhi, Mumbai, and the USA. Each painting stands as a quiet monument — a meditation on what remains after the noise of creation fades, when silence becomes the truest witness to change.

Payal Mondal

Payal Mondal, a printmaking artist who completed her MFA in Printmaking from Rabindra Bharati University in 2024, explores the infinite possibilities of the medium through techniques like etching, serigraphy, woodcut, and intaglio. Her artistic journey is marked by a constant search for alternative and groundbreaking methods that redefine the traditional boundaries of printmaking.

Through her evolving practice, Payal delves into themes drawn from her surroundings and experiences, translating them into layered visual narratives that merge texture, tone, and emotion. Her works reflect both technical precision and conceptual depth—each print becoming a site of experimentation where process and content interact dynamically.

In her quest for innovation, Payal challenges the conventional limits of the printmaking surface, often incorporating unconventional materials and techniques. Her practice continues to grow as an ongoing dialogue between craft and concept, tradition and innovation, reflecting her commitment to expanding the expressive power of printmaking in contemporary art.

Sushruta Sarkar

Sushruta Sarkar is a partner and director at AHAVA Communications, an organisation dedicated to promoting art, culture, literature, theatre, and music. His company has collaborated with leading authors and publishers across India.

A passionate photographer with a deep love for street photography, people, and the threatened environment, he adds value to his camera images with digital intervention that makes bold memorable visual statements.His work has earned him several prestigious awards internationally and his art has been featured in Vogue magazine.

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