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Lot Essay
Regarded as one of India’s most talented modern painters, Bikash Bhattacharjee used a photorealistic aesthetic to create macabre and often chimerical depictions of life in India, particularly through figures of the subaltern and women. Equally inspired by artists as diverse as Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Edgar Degas, Salvador Dali and Andrew Wyeth, Bhattacharjee’s work tends to depict commonplace subjects in unusual and often surreal ways. Snubbing abstraction altogether, the artist instead focused on depictions of subjects usually omitted from Indian visual culture, such as the urban destitute and average, middle-class men and women. These included slum dwellers, laborers and prostitutes, alongside common housewives and working ‘babus’ from his city of Calcutta. “Most of his pictures give a glimpse of a world that lies beyond the canvas which, on its part, ceases to be a quadrangular piece of linen and becomes a door leading to a world unknown – a world of immeasurable depth, haunted by mute, mysterious myrmidons of secretive, sulking souls.” (A. Banerjee, ‘Exhibitions’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, New Delhi, 1974, p. 35)
In his portraits, the artist often elevated these common subjects from their mundane circumstances to the realms of royalty and the divine, endowing them with the power and agency they are otherwise denied. In the present painting, a sensitively rendered portrait of a poor young mother holding her infant, the figures are depicted against an indistinct mountainous background. Above them, an array of swinging temple bells suggests sacredness and inviolability, underlining the artist’s reverence for motherhood, given his own experience of being raised singlehandedly by a widowed mother.
“The relationship between woman and goddess runs through the artist’s oeuvre: beginning with paintings of the woman hidden within the goddess, he progresses to images of ordinary women possessed with divine power [...] Undefined (perhaps indefinable) emotion and an indirect (often inscrutable) method of allusion are conveyed through a slight twist of mouth, the hair or the eyes, painted often without pupils – slight dislocations that lift the work from being a ‘mere’ portrait.” (A. Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern & Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, p. 20)
In his portraits, the artist often elevated these common subjects from their mundane circumstances to the realms of royalty and the divine, endowing them with the power and agency they are otherwise denied. In the present painting, a sensitively rendered portrait of a poor young mother holding her infant, the figures are depicted against an indistinct mountainous background. Above them, an array of swinging temple bells suggests sacredness and inviolability, underlining the artist’s reverence for motherhood, given his own experience of being raised singlehandedly by a widowed mother.
“The relationship between woman and goddess runs through the artist’s oeuvre: beginning with paintings of the woman hidden within the goddess, he progresses to images of ordinary women possessed with divine power [...] Undefined (perhaps indefinable) emotion and an indirect (often inscrutable) method of allusion are conveyed through a slight twist of mouth, the hair or the eyes, painted often without pupils – slight dislocations that lift the work from being a ‘mere’ portrait.” (A. Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern & Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, p. 20)