.jpg?w=1)
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 in London during the late 1960s, where he trained in silkscreen printing techniques.
Just as it draws on his early training as a printmaker, Bawa’s figurative is also influenced by India’s miniature painting traditions. 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).
A striking portrait of an elderly Sikh man with a long white beard, the present lot is part of a series of portraits of ordinary Sikh men the artist encountered in and around the Gurudwaras he visited. The subject of this painting, dressed in flowing robes and holding a sacred kirpan and talwar, could perhaps be one of the gurudwara’s leaders of worship, known as gyanis or granthis, or just a faithful member of the congregation. Bawa’s paintings like this portrait, “take shape around the single form or the compact group, without a trace of architecture to frame them [...] each form, animal and human, rejoices in its plasticity and libidinal energy, its gymnastic ability to defy the strictures of the anatomist. The rounded contours of each toy-like figure speak of its prana, the life-breath that gives it a vital buoyancy, allowing it to occupy rather than be trapped in those flat, glowing, single-colour fields of red, yellow, green or blue that are Bawa’s hallmark device” (R. Hoskote, Manjit Bawa, Modern Miniatures Recent Paintings, New York, 2000, not paginated).
Just as it draws on his early training as a printmaker, Bawa’s figurative is also influenced by India’s miniature painting traditions. 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).
A striking portrait of an elderly Sikh man with a long white beard, the present lot is part of a series of portraits of ordinary Sikh men the artist encountered in and around the Gurudwaras he visited. The subject of this painting, dressed in flowing robes and holding a sacred kirpan and talwar, could perhaps be one of the gurudwara’s leaders of worship, known as gyanis or granthis, or just a faithful member of the congregation. Bawa’s paintings like this portrait, “take shape around the single form or the compact group, without a trace of architecture to frame them [...] each form, animal and human, rejoices in its plasticity and libidinal energy, its gymnastic ability to defy the strictures of the anatomist. The rounded contours of each toy-like figure speak of its prana, the life-breath that gives it a vital buoyancy, allowing it to occupy rather than be trapped in those flat, glowing, single-colour fields of red, yellow, green or blue that are Bawa’s hallmark device” (R. Hoskote, Manjit Bawa, Modern Miniatures Recent Paintings, New York, 2000, not paginated).