Important Notice

The present lot is part of the Doll series that the artist painted in the early 1970s, and reflects the political violence that had impacted his city, Kolkata, at the time. Bhattacharjee happened upon this particular motif by chance - he was asked by a young girl to repair and repaint her discoloured celluloid baby doll. According to Manasij Majumdar, he conceived the Doll series the next day, depicting nocturnal imagery in a... The present lot is part of the Doll series that the artist painted in the early 1970s, and reflects the political violence that had impacted his city, Kolkata, at the time. Bhattacharjee happened upon this particular motif by chance - he was asked by a young girl to repair and repaint her discoloured celluloid baby doll. According to Manasij Majumdar, he conceived the Doll series the next day, depicting nocturnal imagery in a highly realistic idiom, which included dark and deserted cityscapes by night, evoking the atmosphere of fear that was present in the urban space at the time. "He locates [the doll] not in a setting where it would look normal - a trash in a garbage heap, but takes meticulous care, sparing none of his virtuosity, to paint it without any deformation - a hundred per cent toy thing fresh from the shop- shelf... Whether by a technical twist or not, he consciously invests the doll with vivid gestures and airs of a living human and places it under a glare of focus, lit up bright in light coming from an unknown source. As a result every such frame first spells out an uncanny sensation, as does the pictorial structure of any surrealist canvas, of unrelated facts yoked together with no apparent logic or order and then hastens to exude the entire gamut of feelings of innocence and terror, helplessness and violence, and living human presence and lifeless ambience so masterly juxtaposed." (Manasij Majumder, Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee, New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007, pp. 77-78)

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