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Bikash Bhattacharjee (1940 - 2006)
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Lot 30
Bikash Bhattacharjee (1940 - 2006)
Estimate : 25,00,000 - 30,00,000

One of the themes that Bhattacharjee returned to over and over again in his works is that of the female form. Seldom painted from his real life experiences, the forms are markers of the social and political reality where Bhattacharjee lived and the “artist’s own reactions to it of anguish, revulsion and despair” that he expressed through “that of allegorical or metaphorical imagery.” Indeed, what started as depictions of “statuary features of classical antiquity” in the 1970s (after a visit to Konark a few years earlier) became images of “bejeweled women of voluptuous flesh, in canvases of dates as late as 1992 that look like stills from a historical film.” According to Manasij Majumder, 


Many of these portraits have each under focus a woman, each coming from a different social milieu...There is, however, no one pattern to the women in Bikash’s paintings. Even though he treats women as an index of the moral and material fabric of social life, they appear with a wide range of identities in his canvases, each an image of an individual as well as an epitome of all that man has ever made of her or fixed her to be or what transpires when her suppressed self revolts or when she breaks out of the traditional mould. Women, therefore, enact a great diversity of roles in his imagery...


What guides the artist is an unsparingly discreet, almost visionary eye for the truth of the subject he paints...each becoming an icon of inwardness as well as an emblem of some of the most despairing truths about contemporary life and reality...he began to project the portrait as a text taken from the visual reality and then he would work on it to deconstruct its surface meaning. In each, one can therefore read volumes of meaning...The deconstruction is done by various means affecting the spatial or surface composition—by agile and dense brushwork that accentuates the fleshy physicality of paint, by emphasising the sensuous tones of warm colours; by narrowing the gap between the figure and the background space or that between the figure and the spectator; by shedding on the face and elsewhere an uncanny light coming from no natural source; or...by painting a metonymic figure of sculpture, doll, mannequin, etc., either to replace, or to fuse with, the portrait motif. In plenty of instances the strategy is to focus on the eye, rendered sightless, hazed over or black without pupil. Sometimes the most remarkably surrealist mode of his deconstruction is to portray the characters literally headless or faceless or to erase part of the face leaving the eye or lips as the nodal point of expression in the entire image. 



Reference:

Manasji Majumder, “Many Faces of Eve,” Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007), 138.

Judging by the jewellery, stance and clothing of the figure in this painting, this lot likely presents a woman from Bengal’s upper class.

Hammer Price :
18,00,000
+ Buyer premium (0 %)
 0.00
Total
18,00,000
The lot has ended
  • Collection: Oleographs, Lithographs, woodcut prints, etching, and screen- and offset prints Collection: Oleographs, Lithographs, woodcut prints, etching, and screen- and offset prints
Description

One of the themes that Bhattacharjee returned to over and over again in his works is that of the female form. Seldom painted from his real life experiences, the forms are markers of the social and political reality where Bhattacharjee lived and the “artist’s own reactions to it of anguish, revulsion and despair” that he expressed through “that of allegorical or metaphorical imagery.” Indeed, what started as depictions of “statuary features of classical antiquity” in the 1970s (after a visit to Konark a few years earlier) became images of “bejeweled women of voluptuous flesh, in canvases of dates as late as 1992 that look like stills from a historical film.” According to Manasij Majumder, 


Many of these portraits have each under focus a woman, each coming from a different social milieu...There is, however, no one pattern to the women in Bikash’s paintings. Even though he treats women as an index of the moral and material fabric of social life, they appear with a wide range of identities in his canvases, each an image of an individual as well as an epitome of all that man has ever made of her or fixed her to be or what transpires when her suppressed self revolts or when she breaks out of the traditional mould. Women, therefore, enact a great diversity of roles in his imagery...


What guides the artist is an unsparingly discreet, almost visionary eye for the truth of the subject he paints...each becoming an icon of inwardness as well as an emblem of some of the most despairing truths about contemporary life and reality...he began to project the portrait as a text taken from the visual reality and then he would work on it to deconstruct its surface meaning. In each, one can therefore read volumes of meaning...The deconstruction is done by various means affecting the spatial or surface composition—by agile and dense brushwork that accentuates the fleshy physicality of paint, by emphasising the sensuous tones of warm colours; by narrowing the gap between the figure and the background space or that between the figure and the spectator; by shedding on the face and elsewhere an uncanny light coming from no natural source; or...by painting a metonymic figure of sculpture, doll, mannequin, etc., either to replace, or to fuse with, the portrait motif. In plenty of instances the strategy is to focus on the eye, rendered sightless, hazed over or black without pupil. Sometimes the most remarkably surrealist mode of his deconstruction is to portray the characters literally headless or faceless or to erase part of the face leaving the eye or lips as the nodal point of expression in the entire image. 



Reference:

Manasji Majumder, “Many Faces of Eve,” Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2007), 138.

Judging by the jewellery, stance and clothing of the figure in this painting, this lot likely presents a woman from Bengal’s upper class.

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It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

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