Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Fine Arts | June 2017

65 Manjit Bawa (1941 – 2008) Untitled Conte & charcoal on paper, c.1988 Signed ‘Manjit’ l.l. 16.8 x 24.7 in (42.7 x 62.8 cm) Provenance Formerly from the Collection of the Arts Editor, The Statesman , Calcutta who directly received it as a gift from Manjit Bawa. Illustrative Reference For colour illustration of the oil on canvas painting for which Lot 65 is a study please see Let’s Paint the Sky Red ExC. Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India. INR 600,000 – 900,000 USD 9,375 – 14,063 For him the drawing is the device for surveying the state of objects from within and without, and with varied intuitive lines he gives us a spatial account of an image. Manjit is passionately accustomed with the linear identity of his beloveds, both domestic and wild...Through the ages, man has been destroying more and protecting less the wilderness of nature and in the sad process securely shaping his own domicile. He has been using his intellectual guiles to domesticate the wild animals, and to tame them to suit his need he uses his spiritual and emotional power….His works reflect cultural bondage with the world in general and animal and human in particular. Prabhakar Kolte rpt in Manjit Bawa Recent Drawings 2001 , Sakshi Gallery ExC. In Manjit’s drawings, the space is no longer the anchor of the gaze. For, it is invariably engaged in a play and returned. If not, it is lost in the unseen distance of a journey that did not begin or end in a narrative. This interface is no longer a privileged point; it has become multivalent even as that cluster of cows that peer back at you demanding, as if, to know what your performance against theirs is. Thus the interface is decisively resolved. The gaze now exists in the movement – in this new relay of an impossible symbolic exchange where the symbols are dismantled in looks and by looks. These are ‘the bonds that beings and things are waiting for, in order to live’ (Robert Bresson). In this relay of looks, the classical positioning of the modern is, as if, erased. The two- faced gaze is elided. In an equally significant move, all figuration is disengaged from narrative and collected across a bare, an almost abstemious memory. Narrative is stranded as a mere trace in this quiet universe of looks and postures. These forms occur as affectionate markers in Manjit’s long and arduous journeys. Madan Gopal Singh rpt. in Manjit Bawa CCA 1990 ExC. 138 | Osian’s–Connoisseurs of Art