Srijon Chowdhury
Bangladeshi-American, b. 1987, Dhaka, Bangladesh, lives and works in Portland, OR
Srijon Chowdhury, Cycled Through the Wildflower Arcana, 2025, Oil on Linen. Photo by Steven Probert.
Srijon Chowdhury: Phool
Aug 27 - Dec 10
Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College
615 SW Palatine Hill Rd, Portland, OR 97219
Daily from 11:00 AM - 4:00 PM
About the Project
Srijon Chowdhury is a Portland-based painter whose luminous, symbolically charged works merge the personal with the mythological to create dreamlike images of uncanny psychological force. For the 2026 C45 Triennial, he presents Phool, a new chapter in his multi-year project Sigil Cycle. The installation at Lewis & Clark College’s Hoffman Gallery features a welded steel gate structure containing sigils of the tarot's Major Arcana, with corresponding paintings and a central work dedicated to the "The Fool." Drawing on a linguistic slippage where the word "phool" means "flower" in the artist's Bangladeshi dialect, the project reimagines the tarot as a living visual grammar of recurrence and perpetual beginning.
Artist Bio
Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1987), Chowdhury creates narrative oil paintings that move between uncanny realism and saturated, hypnotic stylization, dissolving the boundaries between physical and metaphysical reality. His practice integrates Islamic architecture, William Blake's poetry, tarot, and the Western occult tradition into a single, ongoing cosmology. Within this framework, recurring imagery—such as cherry blossoms, family members, angels, and archaic sigils—operates as a deeply personal symbolic vocabulary.
Chowdhury is represented by P·P·O·W (New York) and Ciaccia Levi (Paris). His work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions internationally, including Cycled Through the Wildflower Arcana at The FLAG Art Foundation (2025), Tapestry at P·P·O·W (2024), Same Old Song at the Frye Art Museum (2022), A Still Life at Ciaccia Levi (2021), and Dandelion Song at Foxy Production (2021). He has also participated in group exhibitions at François Ghebaly, Jessica Silverman, Adler Beatty, and Chapter NY.
His paintings have been reviewed widely in publications including Artforum, The New Yorker, Art in America, Frieze, Spike, and the Los Angeles Times. He holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and a BFA from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
Srijon Chowdhury, Butterflies and Moths with Cherry Blossoms. Photo by Mario Gallucci.
Srijon Chowdhury, Sigil Gate, 2024, Welded Steel, Oil on Linen. Photo by JSP Art Photography.