Bikash Bhattacharjee (21st June1940 - 18th December 2006) would often say that he wanted his portraits to be so close to life that the viewer could feel the blood course through the veins of his subjects. And he managed this with remarkable skill.
Painter Bikash Bhattacharjee is one of India’s most widely acclaimed painters. He was a realist in technique who used the traditions of Titian and Velasquez in unexpected, often highly symbolic, unsettling and surrealistic ways. Bhattacharjee accepted the challenge of transforming his consummate skill to evoke the subtleties of surface realism into a pliant tool of creativity without dismantling the received art forms.
In 2006, a few days before Bikash Bhattacharjee’s death at the age of 66, MF Husain had described him as “a painter of our time, whose browns are burnt like in Rembrandt”. The praise for the Bengal artist came in the foreword of a book on him.
The realist artist would have been happy, after all he had often expressed his admiration for Rembrandt. Like the Dutch artist, he too fantasized realism, attempting to replicate the minutest details, also turning away from the then popular distortion of figures and abstraction that was being pursued by most artists of his time. “He was a master artist. Unfortunately we don’t see much of his works because most of them are in private collections and do not come out for sale,” said different art collectors and art critics.
His works mainly included the beauty of subject and especially female forms which shows the strange mixture of ethnic spirituality and sensuality. The artist explores the possibilities of oil as a medium and can depict the exact quality of drapery or the skin tone of a woman, the peeling walls of an old building. He had also achieved mastery over the capturing of the quality of light, an effect that lends his work a superb realism as well as an enigmatic quality.
“Through the ages, the image of woman has remained enslaved in a gilded frame of ‘Ardha-Nareshwari,’ half man, half woman. In the Bikash woman, the daring third dimension has emerged.” .. M.F. Husain
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