Important Notice

The present lot is part of a series of drawings by Manjit Bawa that were exhibited in a travelling exhibition in New Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai in 2001. It was subsequently exhibited a decade later at a retrospective show of the artist's works in New Delhi and continues to demonstrate Bawa's deft mastery over both mediums, drawing and painting.

Bawa is well known for his sensitive and striking paintings of mythological heroes, saints,... The present lot is part of a series of drawings by Manjit Bawa that were exhibited in a travelling exhibition in New Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai in 2001. It was subsequently exhibited a decade later at a retrospective show of the artist's works in New Delhi and continues to demonstrate Bawa's deft mastery over both mediums, drawing and painting.

Bawa is well known for his sensitive and striking paintings of mythological heroes, saints, acrobats, birds and animals, which take liquid forms on monochromatic backgrounds. In the essay "Dogs Too Keep Night Watch," J Swaminathan writes: "...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. If any linkage has to be traced, perhaps, it could be related to the Pahari miniature tradition or even to pre?miniature Pahari painting. 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." (Reproduced from S Kalidas, Bhavna Bawa, Madan Gopal Singh et al, Let's Paint The Sky Red: Manjit Bawa, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 36)

In the present lot, Bawa retains the "bonelessness" and fluidity of his paintings. The precise, large scale drawings, which are a culmination of Bawa's years of studies and thoughts of unexplored forms, demonstrate his skilled draughtsmanship. In his own words: "To an artist, drawing is a more effective medium, capturing easily the movement and expression of the subject but in my drawing I freeze the subject in space and time. While the rough sketches, often just strong lines in charcoal, have a flow about them, the finished work, despite its flowing movements become formalised and expressive of my own style, of what has become synonymous with my art." (Artist quoted in Ina Puri and Prabhakar Kolte, Manjit Bawa: Recent Drawings - 2001, Mumbai: Sakshi Gallery, 2001)

Although the artist did not intentionally plan it, the composition of the present lot likely served as inspiration for a similarly large-scale oil on canvas painting that he created later. In this later work, Bawa renders the acrobatic figures in flesh and bluish?skin tones (the latter perhaps an allusion to Hindu mythological figures), while transforming the background to a deep blood red.

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