Works by Rabin Mondal

In March 2019, the studio received 13 of Rabin Mondal’s works of art on paper and board. Rabin Mondal is known as one of India’s leading modern painters, and is also a founding member of the ‘Calcutta painters’, a group of artists who worked to promote modernist art not only in Calcutta, but throughout India.

The restoration of these oils and acrylics is still ongoing. Some of them were found stuck to each other, the face of one stuck to the other’s verso. A lot of them had paper stuck on the face of the painting. There were tears and losses in the support. The corners were damaged and most of them had visible previous interventions of mending. Heavy accumulation of dust and dirt was common in all the paintings.

The artworks had to be carefully separated from each other using slow moisture and mechanical methods. The paper residue stuck on some artworks also had to be removed in the same way. The tapes used in the previous intervention were then removed. The weak corners were mended and consolidated. Some areas required inlays and fillers. Full lining and strip lining treatments were performed on a few because of their fragility and damaged condition. The last step was to reintegrate the losses with compatible colour medium.