Important Notice

“His paintings don’t shout despite the brilliant colours. In Manjit’s paintings, red would be silent.”
— (Ranbir Kaleka quoted in Ina Puri, “Blue”, In Black & White: The Authorized Biography of Manjit Bawa, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006, p. 160)
Manjit Bawa painted the present lot in 1988, at the height of his career, by which time he had fully developed the singular visual language that prompted Jagdish Swaminathan to... “His paintings don’t shout despite the brilliant colours. In Manjit’s paintings, red would be silent.”
— (Ranbir Kaleka quoted in Ina Puri, “Blue”, In Black & White: The Authorized Biography of Manjit Bawa, New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006, p. 160)
Manjit Bawa painted the present lot in 1988, at the height of his career, by which time he had fully developed the singular visual language that prompted Jagdish Swaminathan to describe him as “a painter of true significance on the Indian scene.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, quoted in S Kalidas, “Let’s Paint the Sky Red: Remembering Manjit Bawa in Art and in Life”, Manjit Bawa: Let’s Paint the Sky Red, S Kalidas, Bhavna Bawa et al., New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011, p. 17) Having realised his decades‒long ambition of creating a figural vocabulary independent of both Western naturalism and established Indian conventions, Bawa renders the Hindu god Ganesh with remarkable economy, setting the deity’s fluid, rounded form against a lush monochromatic field of red.
The fluid, rounded contours that define Bawa’s stylised figures were the product of his habitual drawing practice in which continually experimented with line and form in the sketchbook he maintained. Although the artist represents Ganesh without his conventional attributes, the deity remains instantly recognisable through his extraordinary command of colour and form. Eliminating surfeit detail, he distils the figure to its most elemental form, rendering it in luminous shades of white with subtle tonal modelling that imparts both sculptural volume and an otherworldly radiance. The saturated red ground possesses a vitality of its own, and functions not as a backdrop but as a boundless, timeless space that both contains and heightens the iconic presence of the figure, inviting the viewer into a quiet contemplation of the divine.
Explaining his affinity for mythological figures, the artist remarked, “They remain to me basically mythical icons—as Durga, Kali, Shiva, Krishna or even Heer‒Ranjha, Mirza‒Sahiba or Sohni‒Mahiwal. In my world of imagination they are very real. I have known them from childhood tales and fables narrated to me by my father. As I grew up, I met them again in literature, music, poetry and art. What else can I paint? Or draw?” (Artist quoted in “I Cannot Live By Your Memories”, Kalidas, Bawa et al., p. 47.)
As art historian Susan Bean notes, “vital to the effect of Bawa’s work is his brilliant play with color.” The flat, homogenous colour fields against which his figures emerge were a stylistic choice influenced by his training in serigraphy in London during the 1960s. However, the sombre palette of blue, grey, and beige that dominated much of Western painting felt alien to the artist. He instead embraced the vibrant greens, yellows, pinks, purples, and other colours of the Indian landscape.
Works such as the present lot, with their expansive fields of red, rank among Bawa’s most sought‒after compositions. The colour held a personal significance for the artist, whose mind had been emblazoned with the image of a forest of orange‒red palash flowers that seemed to merge seamlessly with the fiery glow of the setting sun during a visit to Sohna in Haryana as a student in the late 1950s. Determined to capture the vision on canvas, he returned a month later, only to find that the blossoms had withered. The following year, he attempted to painstakingly paint each bud and petal in search of its essence. It would take many years, however, before Bawa achieved the rich reds that came to define his mature practice and became an integral part of his visual language.

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