Close to Events : Works of Bikash Bhattacharjee

Bikash Bhattacharjee stood out by making hard-edged chiseled realism the core appeal of his canvases when realism or naturalism was considered a retrograde trend. He was admired for the obvious or subtle distortions in his imagery as a key to their complex multi-layered meanings. 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.