A mention of artist Bikash Bhattacharjee brings to mind the large repertoire of his spellbinding portraits, which depicted Bengali people from different classes and social milieus, especially women. Portraying his subjects with minute details of their form and depth in their gaze, the artist deftly mastered the effects of light and shadow that rendered his works a photo-like enigmatic quality. Bikash Bhattacharjee explored the possibilities of oil as a medium to the extent that he could depict the exact quality of drapery or the skin tone of a woman. With a juxtaposition of the real with the unreal, Bhattacharjee created works that emanated a sense of gloom, and yet were beautiful.
Born in an undivided Bengal in 1940, Bikash Bhattacharjee lost his father as a young child and grew up watching his mother struggle to raise her two children. He emerged as a fiercely individualistic artist who charted his own creative trajectory.
Bhattacharjee was highly inspired by the works of the old European masters like Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, and Edgar Degas, amongst others. He closely studied the works of these masters, resulting in the rigorous precision of form that he brought to his figures. Through the course of his career, Bikash Bhattacharjee explored various mediums and genres. Finding his inspiration from the dilapidated buildings of old Calcutta he had seen growing up, the artist showcased a collection of cityscapes during his first solo exhibition in 1965. During the late 1960s, his works were predominantly collages, and he also created several works by distorting the human form and rendering them in a surrealist manner. After experimenting with collages, the artist focussed more on creating his portrait-based images, which would catapult him as one of the most promising and talented artists in the landscape of Indian art
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