Untitled (Cow)

Manjit Bawa's command of color and space creates truly mesmerizing compositions. His "[...] free flowing, arabesque figures, both human and animal, are almost like personifications of fragments of thoughts, ideas, of words and poetry that are introduced into a rational real world by him." (A. Vadehra, Let's Paint the Sky Red: Manjit Bawa, New Delhi, 2011, p. 7) Bawa renews and reinvigorates the traditional language of miniature paintings using stylized forms on a uniformly colored background. Bawa's luminescent monochromatic realities do not represent a void, nor are they merely a formal mechanism or tableau, but a tangible entity which is as central to the work as the figures suspended within it.

As critic Geeta Kapur noted about Bawa's paintings, "Manjit paints great expanses of colour with forms that are non-representational but with certain image-associations - rubbery limbs for most part - left floating in a fluorescent colour-field which though flat, is subtly tinted and holds up the forms, limp or aggressive, like the diaphanous, bright-hued tent of the sky holds up cloud formations.” (G. Kapur, cited in S. Kalidas, ‘Let’s Paint The Sky Red’, Let’s Paint the Sky Red: Manjit Bawa, New Delhi, 2011 p. 12) Bawa defines dimensions of pure sumptuous color which enraptures its subjects as this cow suspended in a blood red background seems suspended in stasis, eternally trapped in this ethereal reality.