Important Notice

Bikash Bhattacharjee's series of 'Doll' paintings from the early 1970s, particularly his nocturnal landscapes populated by dolls, reflects the political violence that was taking his city, Kolkata, by storm at the time. The origins of the series, however, can be traced to the day when a young girl asked him to repair and repaint her baby doll. "Late that night when Bikash returned from his downtown studio, the doll in hand, trudging along the... Bikash Bhattacharjee's series of 'Doll' paintings from the early 1970s, particularly his nocturnal landscapes populated by dolls, reflects the political violence that was taking his city, Kolkata, by storm at the time. The origins of the series, however, can be traced to the day when a young girl asked him to repair and repaint her baby doll. "Late that night when Bikash returned from his downtown studio, the doll in hand, trudging along the empty violence-stained streets to his North Calcutta home he had an epiphanic experience of trauma and terror haunting the city and their multi-layered impact upon man in his social and existential context." The next day, "He hit upon the idea of placing not a human figure but a baby doll as the central motif of the desolate city-scape soaked with the terror of political violence…As a result every such frame first spells out an uncanny sensation, as does the pictorial structure of any surrealist canvas, of unrelated facts yoked together with no apparent logic or order and then hastens to exude the entire gamut of feelings of innocence and terror, helplessness and violence, and living human presence and lifeless ambience so masterly juxtaposed" (Manasij Majumder, Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee, Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2007, p. 78).

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