Important Notice

“There has to be a certain freshness and newness in one’s art, otherwise it’s pointless to pursue it. To be different means doing something you have never done before.” - MANJIT BAWA

Manjit Bawa's art, like the artist himself, was a sensitive and complex amalgamation of influences that were vast and eclectic. Entirely figurative throughout his career, his work was deeply rooted in poetry and philosophy. For technique, he drew upon... “There has to be a certain freshness and newness in one’s art, otherwise it’s pointless to pursue it. To be different means doing something you have never done before.” - MANJIT BAWA

Manjit Bawa's art, like the artist himself, was a sensitive and complex amalgamation of influences that were vast and eclectic. Entirely figurative throughout his career, his work was deeply rooted in poetry and philosophy. For technique, he drew upon Mughal, Rajput, and Pahari miniatures, as well as silk-screen printing, which he studied in Britain. For inspiration, he dove into stories from Indian mythology, as well as oral traditions of storytelling and Sufi mysticism, thereby achieving a transcendental quality in his works. By absorbing each of these elements, and a rigorous training in figurative drawing at the School of Art in Delhi, Bawa began distorting forms and creating stylisations that were uniquely his own.

Bawa's paintings are easily identifiable, typically depicting precise, floating characters on flat, vibrant colour backgrounds. He associated colour with Indianness, employing a rich palette to counter the sombre tones of British art. "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." (J Swaminathan, "Dogs Too Keep Night Watch," S Kalidas, Bhavna Bawa et al., Manjit Bawa: Let's Paint the Sky Red, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 36)

The present lot is a portrait of a young boy, most likely Bawa's son, and is painted in keeping with the artist's minimalistic style. 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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