Important Notice

Lot 78

Born in Punjab in 1941, Manjit Bawa has absorbed and translated the religion, culture, and natural environs of his birthplace into striking icons on his canvases. He calls this process ‘manthan’, or a “churning process in the artist’s mind”, through which Bawa’s idiom and “art emerge from a debris of broken images, half formulated feelings, fragments of songs vaguely recollected, memories of epics and the folk tales heard as a child” (Ina Puri,... Born in Punjab in 1941, Manjit Bawa has absorbed and translated the religion, culture, and natural environs of his birthplace into striking icons on his canvases. He calls this process ‘manthan’, or a “churning process in the artist’s mind”, through which Bawa’s idiom and “art emerge from a debris of broken images, half formulated feelings, fragments of songs vaguely recollected, memories of epics and the folk tales heard as a child” (Ina Puri, “Reflections on Manjit Bawa”, in Manjit Bawa – Modern Miniatures, Recent Paintings, Bose Pacia Modern Catalogue, 2000, unpaginated). The artist’s use of rich hues and homogenous fields of saturated color and his outright rejection of superfluous details like landscape is influenced both by Rajput and Pahari miniature painting as well as his prior experiences with Western techniques like serigraphy and silkscreen printing.

Though his work is almost always figurative and rooted in very real experiences and beliefs, Bawa’s men, women, gods and animals are suspended wondrously in colorful space and are rendered with a simple fluidity that borders on the abstract. Rather than brushstroke and texture, Bawa relies on subtle shading to deliver depth to his canvases, and rather than developing only a narrative, he perfects form. Though this may seem a simple or na?ve aesthetic, these characteristics come together to give his paintings an arresting luminosity, and his characters a dreamlike presence.

In this untitled large format work, as in many of Bawa’s other pieces, a human-animal interaction is central. As a woman dressed in traditional Punjabi clothes sits holding her head, dogs that are gathered round her lick her feet and a man – possibly Krishna or the artist himself, with only his torso portrayed – seems to be offering some form of commiseration for her situation. Believing this portrayal of interaction between species to be a preoccupation with “the theme of a universal language of communication”, Ranjit Hoskote understands Bawa’s works as probing the dynamics and asymmetries of relationships like those between creator and viewer, spectator and performer, and perhaps even between Bawa and his autistic son. (Manjit Bawa – Modern Miniatures, Recent Paintings, Bose Pacia Modern Catalogue, 2000, unpaginated).

A good example of Bawa’s mastery of colour and chiaroscuro, this canvas is also a magnificent display of the artist’s ability to pare the figure down to a bare minimum, condemning the details that do not relate to its essence to another world. Though the dogs have no eyes, for instance, their tongues have been spared to illustrate their own empathy for the seated woman.

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