Important Notice

Bikash Bhattacharjee's paintings are hyper-realistic in their execution of technical details and colour, and on close inspection, are unsettling. In the present lot, the innocent reverie of a small boy is juxtaposed against an immense pockmarked landscape with an isolated house barely visible over the horizon. Trails of barbed wire, and an extreme close-up of part of a built structure add a menacing tone. Detailed, almost impressionistic... Bikash Bhattacharjee's paintings are hyper-realistic in their execution of technical details and colour, and on close inspection, are unsettling. In the present lot, the innocent reverie of a small boy is juxtaposed against an immense pockmarked landscape with an isolated house barely visible over the horizon. Trails of barbed wire, and an extreme close-up of part of a built structure add a menacing tone. Detailed, almost impressionistic rendition of shrubbery in the foreground manages to convey beauty as well as discomfort. Writing about similar works from the 1970s through the 1990s, Manasij Majumder says that such paintings "give one some idea of the artist's own childhood even if these canvases are not entirely autobiographical... Bikash has always cherished the memories of his growing up as a boy, under the loving care of his widowed mother, dogged no doubt by a sense of insecurity, loneliness and poverty." (Manasij Majumder, Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007, p. 200)

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