Close to Events
Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee
Paper Type: Art Paper (Matt) | Size: 311 x 241mm
All colour; 235 photographs; 250 pages; Hardback
ISBN-10: 8189738240 | ISBN-13: 978-81-89738-24-2
2000 | 67 | 39
Launching his creative career in the late 50s,
Bikash Bhattacharjee stood out among his contemporaries by making hard-edged
chiseled realism the core appeal of his canvases when realism or naturalism of
every shade was considered a retrograde trend. Bikash’s strengths were his
exceptional technical mastery and his power to charge the tangible appearance
of the surface with the reality of the depth beneath. He was admired not merely
for the near-illusionist evocation of realistic details, but for the obvious or
subtle distortions in his imagery as a key to their complex multi-layered
meanings. His realistic idiom is fascinatingly robust and compulsive, laced
with rich irony, strong-veined allegory and lush visual metaphors. His
portrait-based images enact the artist’s own experience of our time with all
its dark social and moral tones and textures. Close to Events: Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee deals with Bikash’s
early life in an old North Calcutta locality, the urban social ambience that
shaped his creative personality and explores why he chose to remain ‘close to
events’ and free from the dominant trends in post-Independence Indian art. It
also analyses the technical and stylistic development of art with detailed
exposition of some of the themes and subjects in the major series of his
paintings. Internationally renowned artist MF Hussain has written the Foreword
to this volume.
Manasij Majumder
Author
Manasij
Majumder is a well-known name in the
field of art writing in India. He started out as a lecturer in English in a
college affiliated to Calcutta University, but throughout his teaching career
he wrote regularly on Art, Theatre, Dance and various other cultural events.
After retiring as Reader in English, he now continues to write on Art,
profiling artists, introducing catalogues and exhibitions as well as full length
studies of several major artists.
M. F. Husain
Foreword
Maqbool Fida Husain better known as M. F. Husain (17
September 1915 – 9 June 2011) was a controversial Indian artist known for executing
bold, vibrantly coloured narrative paintings in a modified Cubist style. He was one of
the most celebrated and internationally recognized Indian artists of the 20th
century, and was associated with Indian modernism in the 1940s.
His themes—sometimes treated in series—include topics as diverse as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the British Raj, and motifs of Indian urban and rural
life.