Bikash Bhattacharjee 1940-2006 Red Balloon

Contemporary Indian Paintings from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Charitable Trust, Sotheby's NY, 12 June 1995

"I react to my environment, to what is happening around me all the time, today, 1982.  I love my family, my city, my country. And I see it all going, being destroyed. Gandhi has no meaning for us any more, or Karl Marx.  They are idols, raised on pedestals, put away at a height, out of sight. We have no use for them." (Lakshmi Lal 2004, p.38)

Bikash Bhattacharjee is generally recognised as one of  India's leading painters in the western surrealist tradition. Bikash lost his father as a child and the consequent struggle for survival without his support is often reflected in his work. Childhood symbols such as dolls and balloons that frequently appear in his works become metaphors for his loss and suffering and the suffering that he witnessed around him.  Through his paintings, he depicts the life of the average middle-class Bengali, their aspirations, superstitions, hypocrisy and corruption, and even the violence that is endemic to Calcutta. In the current work academic realism is heightened to a state where it merges with the world of waking dreams revealing his rare ability to juxtapose the real with the unreal, creating a world of haunting and hypnotic imagery.