An exhibition featuring artworks of Bengal-born artist, Lalu Prasad Shaw, certified using Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is on view at Terrain.art till July 31. Conceptualised as the first edition of ‘Masters’, the show features a comprehensive selection of Shaw’s works that hold a significant provenance.

Like many of his contemporaries such as Jamini Roy, Shaw’s artistic language throughout his career has predominantly been figurative. His stylized representations encompass diverse subjects and objects staged meticulously in a pictorial frame.

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Musing on the multiple facets of the Bengali middle class, Shaw’s paintings dramatize the everyday life of people he observed in his immediate surroundings. His unique approach to composition resonates both with Kalighat pats and early studio photography. While primarily a painter, Shaw is also an accomplished printmaker, having studied the techniques of intaglio and lithography.

This exhibition is an important step towards propelling the dialogue around South Asian Art in line with the platforms vision to foster a virtual and global ecosystem for art, artists and collectors from the region beginning with India, using future technologies like blockchain. Terrain.art is a blockchain-powered online platform that focuses on art from South Asia.

Aparajita Jain, Founder, notes, “Terrain.art is delighted to be one of the first blockchain powered platforms in India to register artworks using NFTs, presenting new works and those with prior histories through curated exhibitions.”

Showcasing a careful selection of 27 recent paintings by Lalu Prasad Shaw, this exhibition makes him the first Indian modern artist to showcase paintings with registered non-fungible tokens, says the platform. NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens, are unique digital assets that can be used as individual identifiers for physical assets on a blockchain, allowing for authenticated ownership and facilitating a transparent and tamper-proof transfer of digital ownership each time the works are resold in an effort to protect the artist’s future legacy.