Important Notice

Bikash Bhattacharjee emerged as an artist at a time when his peers were taken with modernism and abstract representation. The artist, raised in Bengal where the culture was informed by a humanism derived from the European Enlightenment, “was instinctually led to admire and emulate the western old masters whose works always exude a broad spirit of humanism, in form, content and technique, aiming primarily at the idealized or realistic... Bikash Bhattacharjee emerged as an artist at a time when his peers were taken with modernism and abstract representation. The artist, raised in Bengal where the culture was informed by a humanism derived from the European Enlightenment, “was instinctually led to admire and emulate the western old masters whose works always exude a broad spirit of humanism, in form, content and technique, aiming primarily at the idealized or realistic representation of man and woman either in portraits or in images of life in social or natural settings. His canvases are portraits of men and women, characters who come straight from his own experience of real life events with its dense dark social and moral tones and textures.” (Manasij Majumder, “Bikash Bhattacharjee,” Bikash Bhattacharjee: A Retrospective, Kolkata: Aditya Agarwal, Mohan Goenka, Richa Agarwal and Vikram Bachhawat for Emami Chisel Art, 2009, p. 15) The present lot exemplifies the artist’s remarkable photorealistic style arrived at through meticulously building up his craft. The influence of the Dutch Golden Age painter Rembrandt is evident in Bhattacharjee’s use of light and shadow and shares a sepia palette that many of his best-known works were painted in.

His canvases were suffused with humanism and used his subject’s eyes to create a sympathetic bond between them and the viewer according to art critic Marta Jakimowicz-Karle. In her words, “The eyes of Bhattacharjee’s figures steadily regard what goes on in front of them, yet are equally attuned to the within. An eye contact between the viewer and the viewed figure establishes the channel through which empathy and understanding can follow, an entering of one person by another.” (Marta Jakimowicz-Karle, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Bangalore: Kala Yatra, 1991, p. 1) Inspired by the cinematic arts, he also employed his own gaze in order to create an image that seemed like a moment frozen from a narrative. Art critic Manasij Majumder states that the auteur Satyajit Ray’s use of the film camera informed his portraiture. “The structural clarity of his imagery often recalls frames from the films by the legendary Satyajit Ray… In fact in many of his portrait-based images the characters come under the probing gaze of the artist the way in which in an intense psychological moment the camera indulgently lingers on the protagonist in middle shot of a feature film frame.” (Majumder, p. 15)

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