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Descriptif du lot
Painted in 1998, Untitled (Woman and Bird) is a poignant distillation of Manjit Bawa’s transmutations of the figures of his imagination. Rejecting the textured, expressionist surfaces of many of his contemporaries, Bawa instead embraced a pristine finish and elegant simplicity that appears utterly effortless. The figures in these paintings are anchored against luminous monochromatic fields of color, a technique that the artist started to use and honed following his training in silkscreen printing in England in the 1960s. Far from being a void or backdrop, these vibrant grounds possess their own personhood, acting as tangible characters or entities that suspend the artist’s figures in realms of mysticism and magic.
With his mastery of color and space, Bawa creates compositions of mesmerizing clarity, as seen in the present lot. As the historian Susan Bean writes, “vital to the effect of Bawa's work is his brilliant play with color. His childhood memories of color were strong: green paddy fields, blue waters of the Beas River; bold strong hues of the local embroidered pulkari shawls, the riot of color during the festival of Holi. While still a young artist, he consciously struggled to harness these experiences in his work [...] For a period, he earned his living in a silk screening studio and later he taught the technique. But his attachment was to painting. His mastery of serigraphy instilled an appreciation of the power of luminous pure color and sharply delineated forms” (S. Bean, Midnight to the Boom, Painting in India After Independence, New York, 2013, p. 128).
Here, the central female figure encapsulates Bawa’s singular approach to the human form. As his friend and fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan observed, “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). In the present lot, the woman’s form is defined not by anatomical structures, but by a melodic economy of line. Draped in a rich yellow fabric that mirrors the background, she emerges from and seems simultaneously absorbed by her monochromatic, horizonless surroundings. Anchored only by the physical edges of the painting and her contrasting chestnut hair, she invites the viewer into her mystical realm.
In the painted worlds Bawa creates, “humans and animals engage in a wordless dialogue that throws its participants back onto an older, nearly forgotten language of instinct and intuition. Standing before these paintings, we realize that Bawa has long been preoccupied with the theme of a universal language of communication” (R. Hoskote, Manjit Bawa: Modern Miniatures, Recent Paintings, New York, 2000, unpaginated). Here, the wordless interaction between the woman, who retains and returns the gaze of the viewer unabashedly, and the bird perched on her shoulder serves as a cornerstone of the painting’s thematic depth. Rendered with the same effortless clarity, the black bird, perhaps a common raven, exists both as a possession and as a sentient participant in the silent communion that animates the scene.
An intimate composition, Untitled (Woman and Bird) represents the culmination of Bawa’s technical prowess at the turn of the millennium. With an almost ironic simplicity, the artist conjures a window into an alternate world filled with imagination, myth, mysticism and magic.
With his mastery of color and space, Bawa creates compositions of mesmerizing clarity, as seen in the present lot. As the historian Susan Bean writes, “vital to the effect of Bawa's work is his brilliant play with color. His childhood memories of color were strong: green paddy fields, blue waters of the Beas River; bold strong hues of the local embroidered pulkari shawls, the riot of color during the festival of Holi. While still a young artist, he consciously struggled to harness these experiences in his work [...] For a period, he earned his living in a silk screening studio and later he taught the technique. But his attachment was to painting. His mastery of serigraphy instilled an appreciation of the power of luminous pure color and sharply delineated forms” (S. Bean, Midnight to the Boom, Painting in India After Independence, New York, 2013, p. 128).
Here, the central female figure encapsulates Bawa’s singular approach to the human form. As his friend and fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan observed, “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). In the present lot, the woman’s form is defined not by anatomical structures, but by a melodic economy of line. Draped in a rich yellow fabric that mirrors the background, she emerges from and seems simultaneously absorbed by her monochromatic, horizonless surroundings. Anchored only by the physical edges of the painting and her contrasting chestnut hair, she invites the viewer into her mystical realm.
In the painted worlds Bawa creates, “humans and animals engage in a wordless dialogue that throws its participants back onto an older, nearly forgotten language of instinct and intuition. Standing before these paintings, we realize that Bawa has long been preoccupied with the theme of a universal language of communication” (R. Hoskote, Manjit Bawa: Modern Miniatures, Recent Paintings, New York, 2000, unpaginated). Here, the wordless interaction between the woman, who retains and returns the gaze of the viewer unabashedly, and the bird perched on her shoulder serves as a cornerstone of the painting’s thematic depth. Rendered with the same effortless clarity, the black bird, perhaps a common raven, exists both as a possession and as a sentient participant in the silent communion that animates the scene.
An intimate composition, Untitled (Woman and Bird) represents the culmination of Bawa’s technical prowess at the turn of the millennium. With an almost ironic simplicity, the artist conjures a window into an alternate world filled with imagination, myth, mysticism and magic.