Ramkinker Baij - The fruit gatherers - exhibit at NGMA bangalore

This sculpture really jumped out at me when i was going slowly, through the multitude of work that was on display at NGMA recently.The artist in spotlight was ramkinker baij. an artist from west bengal and one of the pioneers of modern indian sculpture.

I stood in front of this work for a good hour or forty five minutes, and i loved it.but i didnt know why.
And now after ive gone back to susan sontag's article, its become clearer to me that i was trying my hardest to make sense of what i saw. so that i could "understand" it. and move on.

Strangely though, to this date, i dont know what the work is about, yet this image has been in me head ever since. the title says "fruit gatherers" so that atleast gave me some lenses to look at it from. and the figures look like that of tribal women who would go around gathering fruit in the woods. this i think comes under the studium part of the work. it gives me some idea of the setting or cultural context that the work arises from.

But what really caught my attention, punctured me, the punctum is somewhere hidden between those intertwined, abstracted forms of two females with the fruit falling our of the basket onto their rough stone figures. i dont know what it exactly is, and i guess the fact that i dont know is what is magical about it is what really interests me.
it really lifts the work from a representation of two tribal women gathering fruits on a studium level, to a point where it is exctremely personal, it punctures, it is not any two women, but these two women. i want to know their names, what they are doing. in a strange way, and i hope its not saying too much, this scultpture excited/aroused me on a very visceral, physical level and i was left intrigued and trying to imagine these two women, how they would have been, how they would have been feeding each other the sweet juicy fruit they had just plucked off the trees.in a sense this work really captured that moment, not just on an information level, but with all its confusions, its nuances, emotions, sparks, and resonances.