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Lot Essay
Manjit Bawa’s unique artistic vocabulary is characterized, most notably, by figures pared down to their essential forms. Frequently depicting icons from Indian cultural and religious traditions, Bawa’s figures underline the mastery of color that the artist honed over the course of his career. The refined gradations of tone within his figures attribute them with depth, weight and volume, anchoring them against the jewel-like fields of saturated color that they inhabit. The artist’s deft juxtapositions of complementary colors and the luminous, monochromatic backgrounds of his works are also influenced by his time at the London School of Printing in the late 1960s, where he trained in silkscreen techniques.
According to his friend and fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan, “Manjit’s figure is at once an assertion of tradition and its negation. It hardly owes anything to the realism of the West and its expressionistic aftermath. If any linkage has to be traced, perhaps, it could be related to the Pahari miniature tradition or even pre-miniature Pahari painting. 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’, Let’s Paint the Sky Red, New Delhi, 2011, p. 36).
The present lot, Untitled (Narasimha), is executed in the artist’s archetypal style, eliminating all extraneous details to focus the viewer’s attention on a figure constructed with an almost fluid, amoeba-like form. Placed against a vibrant red background, Narasimha appears to be floating in “animated suspension,” a quality, which as Swaminathan points out, bares likeness to folk theater backdrops, which “as the image is revealed [...] itself becomes the enactment” (J. Swaminathan, Ibid., 2011, p. 37).
Narasimha, literally meaning man-lion, is one of the ten avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu. Incarnated as a fierce half-man, half-lion, it was Narasimha’s duty to restore dharma or cosmic order in the universe by overcoming evil forces that no one else was able to. Typically, he is depicted with the limp body of the demon king Hiranyakashipu across his lap, and Bawa has painted him in this form too. After Hiranyakashipu’s brother was killed by Vishnu in his boar-form avatar, Varaha, he decided to seek vengeance and kill Vishnu. In order to achieve powers capable of defeating the god, he performed penance to Brahma. Pleased by his worship, Brahma granted him the boon of his choice: that he could not be killed by either man or animal, either inside or outside, either during the day or night, either on the ground or in the sky, and either by animate or inanimate weapons. With this boon, Hiranyakashipu gained immeasurable power, and an accompanying sense of pride and arrogance. Vishnu, however, in the form of Narasimha, found an approach to overthrow this seemingly undefeatable demon. At the moment of dusk (neither day nor night) Narasimha (neither man nor animal) emerged from behind a pillar (neither inside nor outside), and placed the demon on his lap (neither on the ground nor in the sky), killing him with his claws (neither animate nor inanimate weapons). As such, the story of Narasimha is a grisly but instructive parable about arrogance and hubris.
According to his friend and fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan, “Manjit’s figure is at once an assertion of tradition and its negation. It hardly owes anything to the realism of the West and its expressionistic aftermath. If any linkage has to be traced, perhaps, it could be related to the Pahari miniature tradition or even pre-miniature Pahari painting. 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’, Let’s Paint the Sky Red, New Delhi, 2011, p. 36).
The present lot, Untitled (Narasimha), is executed in the artist’s archetypal style, eliminating all extraneous details to focus the viewer’s attention on a figure constructed with an almost fluid, amoeba-like form. Placed against a vibrant red background, Narasimha appears to be floating in “animated suspension,” a quality, which as Swaminathan points out, bares likeness to folk theater backdrops, which “as the image is revealed [...] itself becomes the enactment” (J. Swaminathan, Ibid., 2011, p. 37).
Narasimha, literally meaning man-lion, is one of the ten avatars of the Hindu god Vishnu. Incarnated as a fierce half-man, half-lion, it was Narasimha’s duty to restore dharma or cosmic order in the universe by overcoming evil forces that no one else was able to. Typically, he is depicted with the limp body of the demon king Hiranyakashipu across his lap, and Bawa has painted him in this form too. After Hiranyakashipu’s brother was killed by Vishnu in his boar-form avatar, Varaha, he decided to seek vengeance and kill Vishnu. In order to achieve powers capable of defeating the god, he performed penance to Brahma. Pleased by his worship, Brahma granted him the boon of his choice: that he could not be killed by either man or animal, either inside or outside, either during the day or night, either on the ground or in the sky, and either by animate or inanimate weapons. With this boon, Hiranyakashipu gained immeasurable power, and an accompanying sense of pride and arrogance. Vishnu, however, in the form of Narasimha, found an approach to overthrow this seemingly undefeatable demon. At the moment of dusk (neither day nor night) Narasimha (neither man nor animal) emerged from behind a pillar (neither inside nor outside), and placed the demon on his lap (neither on the ground nor in the sky), killing him with his claws (neither animate nor inanimate weapons). As such, the story of Narasimha is a grisly but instructive parable about arrogance and hubris.