S H Raza (1922 - 2016)

Sayed Haider Raza was born in 1922 in Madhya Pradesh and studied painting at the Nagpur School of Art and the Sir J.J.School of Art. After receiving a French government scholarship in 1950 he left for Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts, Paris. Raza was awarded the Prix de la Critique in Paris in 1956. In 1962 he served as a visiting lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, USA. Raza was one of the founders of the Progressive Artists’ Group, along with K.H. Ara and F.N. Souza. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1958, the Biennale de Menton, in France in 1966, 1968 and in 1978, and Contemporary Indian Painting, at the Royal Academy in London, in 1982.

In December 1978 the Madhya Pradesh Government invited him to his native state for homage and an exhibition of his work in Bhopal. He was elected Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1983. In 1997 Raza was awarded the Madhya Pradesh Government’s prestigious Kalidas Samman.

He was conferred the Padma Shree Award by the President of India in 1981, the Padma Bhushan in 2007 and Padma Vibhushan in 2013.

Meera Mukherjee (1923 - 1998)

Graduated from Indian Society of Oriental Art School, Kolkata, College of Art, New Delhi. 

Deeply influenced by the Ghorua/Dhokra sculptors of Bastar in Madhya Pradesh, Mukherjee perfected a technique in bronze that was completely her own. Similarly, she evolved an iconography that was unique. Opposing pulls of mass and movement, strength and vulnerability give an intense character to her figures enhanced by the textural play created by the use of decorative elements on the surface. Many of Mukherjee’s works show the use of Bengali calligraphy on the surface. Manifestations of playfulness and whimsy often add another dimension to her work. 

Meera Mukherjee has widely shown in India and in Belgium, Japan & Germany. In 2012 her show was hosted by the Buchheim Museum in Germany along with the Ministry of External Affairs, India. 

Bikash Bhattacharjee (1940-2006)

Born in Kolkata in 1940, Bikash Bhattacharjee lost his father at a very early age. In 1963, he graduated from Indian College of Art and Draftsmanship. He joined the same college as professor in 1968. From 1973, Bhattacharjee began teaching at the Government College of Arts and Crafts and taught there till 1982. 

Bhattacharjee drew inspiration for his work from his early dreary days, where vivid images of his struggling - the crumbling walls of buildings and the multitudes of people living there - wove a certain magic in his mind. His drawings form a fitting introduction to his paintings, forms that are consist in terms of tone rather than line. Bhatacharjee carefully expresses the textural effects of crayons, pastels and pencil using the combination of highlights and depths of passages built of varying intensities of line. Improbable characters (both psychologically and physiologically) play a role on the canvas and dominate his oils. His subject is always clear, recognizable, painted with faithfulness to detail and invested with a sense of the dramatic. Female beauty is a major preoccupation with him with a strange mixture of spirituality and sensuality. The ability to create an authentic milieu as a background to the characters heightens the drama. 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. Bhattacharjee is also known for his Kolkata cityscapes that he worked on in his twenties. 

The artist passed away in 2006.

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