Manjit Bawa

Manjit Bawa was born in 1941 in Dhuri, Punjab, India. He studied fine arts at the College of Art, Delhi Polytechnic, from 1958 to 1963, then traveled to England, where he trained in serigraphy and silk-screen printing at the London School of Printing, Essex, and worked as a printmaker in London from 1967 to 1971.

On returning to India, Bawa developed the style for which he is best known: figures, often mythological or animal, suspended against unmodulated fields of saturated color, with little of the spatial depth or narrative clutter of traditional miniature or academic painting. Critics and gallerists have described this as a deliberate return to figuration at a moment when much of the Indian art establishment favored abstraction. His early recognition came quickly, with the Sailoz Mukherjee Prize in 1963, followed by the National Award from the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1980, a citation at the All India Exhibition of Prints and Drawings, Chandigarh, in 1981, and honors at the first Bharat Bhavan Biennale in Bhopal in 1986. He received the Dayawati Modi Annual Award in 2000.

Several years before his death, Bawa suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma; he remained in that state for approximately three years and died on 29 December 2008 at his residence in the Green Park area of New Delhi, at the age of 67. (One secondary source gives the date of death as 28 December 2008; the majority of contemporaneous reports and gallery statements cite 29 December.)

Bawa is consistently framed by Indian galleries and critics as a painter who reintroduced figuration into a national art conversation dominated by abstraction, using flat color and mythological subject matter to build an idiom that felt both accessible and formally rigorous. His work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. Posthumous solo exhibitions, including Dali's Elephant at Aicon Gallery, London, in 2010, and Let's Paint the Sky Red at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2011, reinforced his standing as one of the artists most closely associated with modern Indian figurative painting.

Bawa's market has grown substantially since his death, tracking wider international interest in Indian modern painting. A 1998 work, Untitled (Krishna and Cow), sold for USD 780,500 at Christie's in 2017. His market moved further in 2023: an Untitled (Shiva) from 1995 realized approximately USD 2.3 million at Sotheby's London in October, and later that year, in December 2023, an untitled 1992 painting of Krishna sold at an AstaGuru online auction for a reported INR 25.11 crore, roughly USD 3.0 million, which stands as his highest reported auction result to date. More recently, Untitled (Radha) sold for a reported INR 18 crore, roughly USD 2 million, at a Saffronart online auction in 2026 (sources give differing dates, cited as early April and mid-June), a strong result but below the 2023 AstaGuru figure. Taken together, these sales show a market that has expanded quickly but remains thin enough that individual results can vary widely depending on subject, size, and venue.

There is no confirmed, published catalogue raisonne for Manjit Bawa, so provenance and authentication rely on the two galleries most closely associated with his estate, Vadehra Art Gallery and DAG, together with auction history and family records. His auction market includes at least two headline results, a December 2023 sale at AstaGuru and a 2026 sale at Saffronart (reported with differing dates in press coverage), reported through different channels and currencies, and collectors should treat any single "record price" claim with care until sale documentation is compared directly. Given the market's still-developing depth, exact subject matter, period, and condition are likely to matter more for Bawa than for artists with a longer, denser public sale history.