Amina Ahmed Kar

Amina Ahmed Kar আমিনা আহমেদ কর (20 Feb 1930, Calcutta, British India ‑21 Jan 1994, Calcutta (now Kolkata), India) was a talented art historian and one of the first women abstract artists in India.

The daughter of a famous dentist surgeon and Bengali politician, she was a precocious and brilliant student while starting to paint at a young age.

In 1949, she went to Paris to study art history and Sanskrit philology with the greatest names in then French Orientalist circles — Philippe Stern, George Coedès, J. Auboyer, H.W. Bailey…In the bohemian circles of Indian expats, she met her future husband, Sri Chintamoni Kar, a respected visual artist.

While exhibiting her artworks with great success in Delhi and Paris (and at the Indian Pavilion at New York World Fair in 1961), she pursued her own research in Khmerology, culminating with the publication of The Angkorian Records in 1977.

Moving away from European influences (she had the Dutch painter Cesar D as a mentor in Paris), she embraced radical abstraction, mono- or achromatism, and lead an always more secluded life, with mental health issues that plagued her until her death at age 65.

In May 2001, Gallery 88 in Kolkata held an exhibition of 54 artworks by Amina Ahmed Kar, found in old notebooks by her widow and fellow painter Chintamani Kar after her passing away.