is considered one of India's most brilliant expressionist painters. About 60 years of age, he can look back at his nine to ten phases of paintings, all of them marked by supreme skill and a sense of integrity. An indefatigable painter, Das jumped from one style to another easily. Das came from a middle class family and his father was just a small businessman. After completing school, he decided to become a painter and joined a local art school. "I am a good sports man," he says. "I like things which have a lot of rhythm and energy." Das's paintings not only express the physical attributes of his subjects but also their associative ones. Every once in a while he paints human beings, but his depiction of the human anatomy is skewed, to a point that it almost borders on macabre surrealism. For example, his series on women with mysterious, tantalising eyes - all oil on canvas, the portraits convey, in various forms including the erotic, the pressures women are subject to. A student of the Government College of Art & Craft in Calcutta, Sunil Das would later also study at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and with William Hayter and Krishna Reddy at Atelier-17, also in Paris. EXHIBITION: Besides having been featured in several exhibitions, his works are also a part of the collections of renowned museums such as the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Glenbarra Art Museum, Japan, and the Ludwig Museum, Germany. AWARDS: Das has won medals and awards, including from the state government and the Lalit Kala Akademi, and has been part of juries and art bodies in India, France and Brazil. Das has the distinction of being the only Indian artist to have won a National Award (the Shiromani Kala Puraskar) while still an undergraduate at the Government College of Art and Craft, kolkata.