Karmakar Abir

Karmakar Abir studied painting at Rabindra Bharati University and lives in Baroda, India. His confessional paintings – with their beguilingly realistic detail, easily mistaken for photographs – lure viewers into a secluded, homoerotic world. He prefers to compose everyday domestic settings, and in these intimate indoor quarters he renders figures, frequently including himself, dressed as a woman and a man, as his way of exploring the male-female duality within all humans as well as the concept of Ardhanarishwara (a principal and hermaphroditic form of the Hindu deity Shiva).