Untitled

Known for his allegorical paintings featuring rich backgrounds in flat tones and bulbous figures, Manjit Bawa painted many landscapes in his early years before he started creating a distinct vocabulary from the late 1970s. When young, he travelled widely and is known to have spread a sheet of paper to draw wherever nature fascinated him. In this Untitled watercolour, his imagination is caught by a cart parked under a tree with a scraggy buffalo on the side. The thick, swift and dark strokes animate the work with the energy of day-time activity at a farm.