Jaya Ganguly in front of one of her larger paintings in CIMA Gallery before the opening of her exhibition on Tuesday. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

It is easy to describe Jaya Ganguly’s body of work, being exhibited at CIMA Gallery from Tuesday, as a gallery of grotesques. Lethal hags with slithering, serpentine bodies and protuberances like giant polyps embrace her canvases with their poisonous toils. They look daggers at viewers, sizing them up through droopy eyes. They are predatory creatures concealed in a hail of dots and strokes, lying in wait of the unwary.

Ganguly may dip her pen and brush in venom but there is as much satire here as there is the erotic in her paintings and smaller drawings. One does not need to be a gynaecologist to discover that this artist, who in the early years of her career used to draw the prostitutes close to her home in Kalighat, explores the origami folds of the female anatomy in her intricate drawings of hybrids with feminine heads – sometimes studded with several eyes — and multiple feline paws draped like ermine.

But perhaps she does it unknowingly. Ganguly admits she is not acquainted with the exquisitely nasty drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, but her masked heads with their arabesques, harlequin headgear and peacock-feather like eyes bear a close resemblance with the wicked Lysistrata drawings of that artist who died young.

These are her recent works. The exhibition begins with her mixed-media drawings, done way back in the mid-1980s.

Her works of that period have the lushness of ripe fruit, to be expected of a youthful person.

She uses bright reds and velvety sable to paint waterlilies, a busty woman wearing a nose pin, and the toothy profiles of two heads in animated conversation. As in her later works, Ganguly’s paintings have a strong graphic quality and her lines carry the conviction of one who knows her mind.

Black, brown and red are Ganguly’s favourite colours and she uses these with great restraint.

She often paints those tortuous, tumorous growths but rarely does she indulge in excesses. When she uses a blood red, it is in a such a sombre shade that the contrast with the black next to it is not too striking. The visual drama is heightened, but Ganguly’s voice does not sound hysterical.

There is another set of drawings here, done in the 1980s, where brown is the dominant shade. These are sharply etched but not clearly defined forms, which could have been inspired by drawings of domestic pests with furry bodies armed with stings and claws.

They are also akin to fungal growth with a life of their own, looking as obscene as the viscous Aliens in the film of the same name, which in turn were inspired by Francis Bacon’s nightmare critters.

But there is nothing nightmarish about Ganguly’s works. Her evisceration is a thoroughly enjoyable exercise. Her work is marked by camp humour, a quality rarely encountered here.

Ganguly distorts forms till they are close to caricatures, but her range and moods are far too wide to be written off as such.