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Lot 26

 

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"There has to be a certain freshness and newness in one's art, otherwise it's pointless to pursue it. To be different means doing something you have never done before." - MANJIT BAWA

Manjit Bawa's striking paintings of imagined and real beings take liquid forms on monochromatic backgrounds. His deceptively simple and sensitive compositions, such as the present lot, draw from a range of mythological, religious, and visual... "There has to be a certain freshness and newness in one's art, otherwise it's pointless to pursue it. To be different means doing something you have never done before." - MANJIT BAWA

Manjit Bawa's striking paintings of imagined and real beings take liquid forms on monochromatic backgrounds. His deceptively simple and sensitive compositions, such as the present lot, draw from a range of mythological, religious, and visual traditions. Rajput and Pahari miniatures play a role in his choice of colour and composition, and the smooth, uniform colours are a result of his training in silkscreen printmaking, which he studied in London in the late 1960s.

Bawa favoured figurative painting over abstraction, deliberately staying away from artistic movements prevalent at the time, and choosing instead to develop a style distinctly his own. He associated colour with Indianness, employing a rich palette to counter the sombre tones of British art. "Manjit's figure is at once an assertion of a tradition and its negation. It hardly owes anything to the realism of the West and its expressionistic aftermath... There is a certain bonelessness, a pneumatic quality to Manjit's figure which echoes both folk Pahari painting and the tantric frescoes of Himalayan Buddhism." (J Swaminathan, "Dogs Too Keep Night Watch," S Kalidas, Bhavna Bawa et al, Manjit Bawa: Let's Paint the Sky Red, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 36)

Many of these elements can be seen in the present lot, in the centre of which the tranquil figure of lord Ganesha drifts in a deep red background, cut off from space, time and context. Bawa renders the figure exclusively in shades of white, expertly painting light and shadows to outline the limbs, features, and flowing folds of the dhoti. The artist has said that his characters are often familiar faces from stories, experiences, memories, and the imagination. Devoid of narrative, this minimalist mode of representation negotiates the tentative boundaries separating reality from the surreal.

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