Important Notice

Born and raised in Dhuri in rural Punjab, Manjit Bawa's paintings reflect the natural and cultural landscape of his birthplace. The artist's use of rich, flat, homogenous fields of colour, stripped of superfluous details, is influenced both by Rajput and Pahari miniature painting and his formal training in silkscreen printing. The serenity of his paintings is also informed by Sufism, a philosophy he believed in deeply, while his subject matter... Born and raised in Dhuri in rural Punjab, Manjit Bawa's paintings reflect the natural and cultural landscape of his birthplace. The artist's use of rich, flat, homogenous fields of colour, stripped of superfluous details, is influenced both by Rajput and Pahari miniature painting and his formal training in silkscreen printing. The serenity of his paintings is also informed by Sufism, a philosophy he believed in deeply, while his subject matter is derived from Indian mythology and Sikh oral traditions.

Bawa's preoccupation with the search for a universal language, through which all sentient beings could express and share their experiences of the world with each other, manifests in his minimalist style. As seen in the present lot, depicting a pristine, lone goat enveloped in a bright red background, the artist pares down the subjects of his paintings to the bare essentials of form and character, rendered with a fluidity that borders on the abstract. Devoid of narrative, this mode of representation negotiates the tentative boundaries separating reality from the surreal.

As Ranjit Hoskote notes, "...in Bawa's paintings, humans and animals engage in a wordless dialogue that throws its participants back onto an older, nearly forgotten language of instinct and intuition. Standing before these paintings, we realize that Bawa has long been preoccupied with the theme of a universal language of communication. How, he appears to ask, do humans and animals account for one another's presence, share their responses? Bawa's question unveils a deeper disquietude: how can two beings, who share the same physical environment but occupy separate mental universes, compare their respective experiences of the world?" (Manjit Bawa: Modern Miniatures, Recent Paintings, New York: Bose Pacia, 2000)

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