Important Notice

"As you grow, you realise the need to minimalise and weed out the unnecessary. Focus becomes all important." - MANJIT BAWA

The present lot is a portrait of a young boy, mostly likely Manjit Bawa's son, and is painted in keeping with the artist's minimalistic style. Bawa deliberately stayed away from artistic movements, choosing instead to develop a style distinctly his own. Known for his sensitive and striking paintings - often... "As you grow, you realise the need to minimalise and weed out the unnecessary. Focus becomes all important." - MANJIT BAWA

The present lot is a portrait of a young boy, mostly likely Manjit Bawa's son, and is painted in keeping with the artist's minimalistic style. Bawa deliberately stayed away from artistic movements, choosing instead to develop a style distinctly his own. Known for his sensitive and striking paintings - often featuring animals, people and mythological figures - the artist typically depicts precise, floating characters on flat colour backgrounds. In the essay "Dogs Too Keep Night Watch," artist Jagdish Swaminathan writes that "...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." (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)

Bawa's portraits and portrayal of humans and animals together often seem intimate, highlighting his lifelong interest in asymmetrical relationships and non-verbal communication. In interacting with his son, Bawa has explained that he often contemplated the ideal of a shared universal language through which all sentient beings could express themselves and share their experiences of the world with each other. His paintings are an attempt at this visual vocabulary, with characters who are often removed from space, time and context as they gaze into the distance, lost in thought or wonderment.

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