Victor Hazra

Victor Hazra

1988

Overview

Victor Hazra’s practice operates as a contemplative inquiry into the delicate and often fraught relationship between humanity and the land. Working across painting and sculpture, Hazra constructs a language that speaks to the enduring transformations of terrain- geological, cultural, and psychological. His compositions are shaped by the residues of human intervention, articulating a poetics of impact that traces the scars, excavations, and inscriptions left behind by civilization’s forward march.

Hazra received his Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata (2014), following a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the Government College of Art and Craft, Agartala (2011). He is the recipient of numerous distinctions, including the Junior Artist Scholarship from the Ministry of Culture, India (2014–16), the Sumangal Sen Memorial Merit Scholarship (2008), and recognition from Tripura Rabindra Parishad, Agartala (2008).

His works have been featured in both solo and group exhibitions, including Gestalt, Solo, Curatorial Advisor: Lina Vincent (APRE Art House, 2024); Encrypted curated by Lina Vincent (APRE Art House, 2023); Futur Proche curated by Sayali Mundye (APRE Art House x TUS, 2023); Interim I (APRE Art House, 2022); Transit (APRE Art House, Bikaner House, New Delhi, 2021); Gwanghwamun International Art Festival (Korea, 2018); D-IS-PLAY II (NIV Art Center, New Delhi, 2016); Eccentric (Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, 2013); and as part of the Pepper House Residency during the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016–2017).

Hazra envisions the planet as a vast sculptural body- constantly reshaped by both natural forces and human intervention. From satellite imagery to tactile surface, the earth becomes a palimpsest of marks, lines, and architectural imprints, recording our passage in geometric and organic form. His work draws equally from these global registers and his immediate surroundings, tracing the material metamorphoses of land, water, and structure through cycles of construction, erosion, and renewal.

Central to his recent work is the anthropomorphic- or at times, bionic- form embedded within the landscape: figures that traverse and occupy time, space, and geography. In Gestalt, his integration of architectonic forms and abstract topographies creates morphic diagrams where circles, squares, and fractured geometries overlap to articulate a larger logic of shifting wholes. These compositions evoke the layered complexity of both natural and constructed environments- where the built world and the body merge in mutable states of being.

Hazra’s practice also gestures toward the unseen: the invisible labour that sustains infrastructural transformation, the corporate architectures of the capitalocene, the violence of displacement and extraction, and the persistent tensions between rural and urban imaginaries. Power, patriarchy, and nation-building form silent architectures within his works- subtextual yet ever-present.


Despite the weight of these concerns, Hazra’s muted palettes and tactile surfaces create moments of equilibrium- acknowledging the possibility of balance within entropy. His practice navigates material and conceptual configurations to construct an ecology of expression: one that bears witness to both fragility and resilience, and to the enduring struggle to reconcile humanity’s presence within the land it inhabits.