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Lot 19

 

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Selectively drawing from Pahari miniature traditions, Manjit Bawa’s “…paintings take shape around the single form or the compact group, without a trace of architecture to frame them… each form, animal and human, rejoices in its plasticity and libidinal energy, its gymnastic ability to defy the strictures of the anatomist. The rounded contours of each toy-like figure speak of its prana, the life-breath that gives it a vital buoyancy, allowing it... Selectively drawing from Pahari miniature traditions, Manjit Bawa’s “…paintings take shape around the single form or the compact group, without a trace of architecture to frame them… each form, animal and human, rejoices in its plasticity and libidinal energy, its gymnastic ability to defy the strictures of the anatomist. The rounded contours of each toy-like figure speak of its prana, the life-breath that gives it a vital buoyancy, allowing it to occupy rather than be trapped in those flat, glowing, single-colour fields of red, yellow, green or blue that are Bawa’s hallmark device” (Ranjit Hoskote, Manjit Bawa: Modern Miniatures, Recent Paintings, Bose Pacia exhibition catalogue, 2000, unpaginated).

Deeply influenced by the teachings of Sufi mystics, the artist often incorporated mythological themes and subjects in his work. In the present lot, one of his larger canvases, Bawa paints Krishna, with an elaborate headpiece of peacock feathers and plumage, leaning over a quiescent lion against a luminous red background. Here, the artist is alluding, perhaps, to the passages from the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna introduces himself as ‘Hari’ or lion, and where he states that his divine manifestation in the animal kingdom is the lion.

Such intimate pairings of humans and animals in Bawa’s work, whether inspired by myth or everyday life in rural India, illuminate the artist’s personal interest in asymmetrical relationships and interpersonal communication. Interacting with his autistic son, Bawa often contemplated the ideal of a universal language, through which all sentient beings could express and share their experiences of the world with each other. “Often 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” (Ibid.).

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