Aakriti Art Gallery presents The Soft Stone, an exhibition of paper pulp casts by Dattatreya Apte, curated by Nanak Ganguly, at Gallery No. 3, Lalit Kala Akademi, Kolkata, from 2 to 14 September 2026. The preview on 2 September will be inaugurated by art critic Uma Nair. A public talk on paper pulp as a medium follows on 3 September.
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A material that refuses its usual role
Paper is ordinarily treated as a support — thin, secondary, a surface that receives an image and then recedes. Apte’s practice reverses that hierarchy. Wet pulp is dyed, pressed into a mould and left to set until fibre acquires weight, edge and permanence. Soft while wet, it hardens into relief. The title of the exhibition names that contradiction: a material we expect to yield, holding form with the quiet authority of stone.
Apte has worked with pulp for more than two decades. A printmaker by training, he has long argued that drawing is the essence of printmaking. Pulp opened a different kind of making. Once the fibre is pressed and allowed to dry, the image is never wholly predetermined. Leaves leave their veins. Architectural fragments leave their edges. Half-legible marks rise like weathered inscriptions. Nature and construction occupy the same plane. The artist has spoken of the element of surprise in the casting process — the moment when the material returns something that was not fully planned.
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From the white casts to colour
The earliest white casts, made in 1999, have an archaeological stillness, as if the forms had been uncovered rather than constructed. Later works introduce pigment, collage and a firmer geometry: brick and house, mask and pedestal, bands of green and blue, fragments that read as both architecture and figure. Colour is often held within the body of the sheet rather than applied only on top. Light does not fall on a flat image so much as travel across a raised edge, catching thickness, shadow and the irregular grain of the pulp.
These are not works that declare themselves from across the room. They reward slow looking — texture, edge, and the small accidents of fibre that no edition can fully repeat.
Print, sculpture, or a third medium
The procedure is graphic: a matrix, pressure, a transfer of mark. The object is sculptural: unique relief, mass, a form that must be seen in depth. Museums, catalogues and the market still prefer a single label. The casts themselves do not. They sit in the intimate register of the surface that remembers — neither pure image nor pure volume.
Indian modern and contemporary practice has already tested this ground. Somnath Hore impregnated wet pulp with pigment and pressed it into carved woodblocks; Zarina Hashmi used cast handmade paper as architecture and measure; later artists have taken fibre toward sculpture and installation.¹ Apte’s contribution is quieter and more sustained: a long fidelity to the cast relief, and a willingness to leave the medium slightly unclassified.
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The Soft Stone does not settle the argument. It stages it. The useful question — print or sculpture — remains open because the work declines a simple answer. What it offers instead is a surface that has received an impression and, in receiving it, become more durable than the moment of contact that made it.
Seeing the work
The exhibition is on view at Lalit Kala Akademi from 2 to 14 September 2026. The talk on 3 September, moderated by Nanak Ganguly, brings together Johny ML, Suresh Jayaram, Dattatreya Apte and Aman Bachhawat to consider paper pulp as print, sculpture, or a category of its own.
Visitors are asked only to look slowly. The soft becomes durable. The fleeting becomes lasting.
Exhibition details
The Soft Stone — Paper Pulp Casts of Dattatreya Apte
Curated by Nanak Ganguly
2–14 September 2026
Gallery No. 3, Lalit Kala Akademi, 85 A.J.C. Bose Road, Kolkata 700014
Preview: Wednesday, 2 September 2026, 5.30 pm
Talk: Thursday, 3 September 2026, 5.30 pm, Multipurpose Hall, 3rd Floor
Presented by Aakriti Art Gallery
Online viewing- www.aakritiartgallery.com
