Series of late Indian contemporary artist Partha Bhattacharjee ever made

Late Partha Bhattacharjee, Indian contemporary artist, President Award winner, and one of the most serious spiritual minds working in modern Indian art worked on various series throughout his life time. Each series built on the last. Each decade asked a harder question than the decade before. And through all of it, from the intimate Family Series of the 1980s to the luminous Durga Series and Rural Series of his final years, a single belief held everything together: that the divine is present in ordinary life, and the task of the artist is to make it visible.

The Foundation: Family, Commission, Semi-Abstraction (1980s)

Partha’s earliest series were autobiographical and aching. Teaching in Orissa and Dhanbad, separated from his family, he painted his homesickness directly onto canvas. The Family Series depicted the women and people he missed with the fidelity of love — oil paint as an act of longing. Alongside these, the Commission Series produced copies of Renaissance masters — Rembrandt, Renoir, Vermeer, Titian — for money that funded his own art. Not wasted years. Foundation years. The light he learned from Rembrandt would live in his own paintings for decades. The Semi-Abstraction Series of this period asked his first formal question: where does the real end and the illusion begin?

The Breakthrough: Devi Series (1990s)

The 1990s gave him his answer and his calling. A journey to the Borra Caves deepened his spiritual life and unlocked a conviction that had been building for years: the ancient feminine life force was real, present, and hiding inside the ordinary lives of Indian women. The Devi Series made this visible. Using Trompe-l’oeil — the technique of painting so precisely that the eye is deceived — Partha placed the goddess inside everyday Indian life, both rural and urban. The woman you see is not merely a woman. Look more carefully. The divine is the third dimension you cannot quite locate but cannot deny.

This series earned him the President of India’s silver plaque for the best work of 2000-2001, awarded by the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society. But the award only confirmed what the paintings already demonstrated: that an award-winning artist had found his fullest voice. The Dawn to Dusk, Mask, and Musician Series surrounded the Devi work with related meditations — on time, on concealment, on music as prayer.

Deepening: Sekal-Ekal, Krishna, Illusion (2000s)

The Devi Series continued to evolve into the 2000s, giving rise to the Sekal-Ekal (Then and Now) Series — the goddess placed in conversation with history, present across centuries and circumstances. The Krishna Series brought the divine masculine into dialogue with the feminine: longing and fulfilment, the human and the sacred in permanent, productive tension. The Illusion Series pushed the Trompe-l’oeil question to its limit. These are paintings for collectors who want more than beauty — who want work that operates as philosophical proposition and aesthetic object simultaneously.

Conscience: Jesus Series, Mahakal Series (2010s)

As the 2010s arrived, Partha made a deliberate move away from European academic influence and toward Indian miniature forms, adding three-dimensional materials to his canvases. The Mahakal Series — rooted in Shakti — carried his call for peace, equality, and justice. The Jesus Series recognised that compassion speaks across religious lines. These are paintings with a conscience, made by a man who understood that art must carry thought as well as beauty and feelings.

The Final Flowering: Rural, Companion, Migrant, Durga (2020s)

After the 2017 cerebral attack took much of his vision, Partha shifted to dry pastel and mixed media on paper — and turned fully toward the folk traditions he had spent decades absorbing in India’s remotest villages. The Rural Series is the fullest expression of that learning. Madhubani, Warli, Gond, and Bengal Patachitra — absorbed across years of travel through Shantiniketan, Tarapith, Sundarban, Raghurajpur, and Ajanta; come together in images that belong to all of these traditions and to none of them individually. They are the work of a painter so thoroughly fluent in India’s oldest visual languages that he now speaks them as his own.

The Migrant Worker Series carries a different weight — the displacement of people from land to city, a homesickness Partha understood from his own years of exile from Chandannagore. The Companion Series is lively: the small dignities of rural life relationships, rendered with warmth and intimacy.

And the Durga Series — part of the Mahakal Series, made in dry pastel and the rural art idiom of Bengal — is perhaps the most spiritually concentrated work he ever produced. Goddess Durga and Parvati as two aspects of one divine feminine. The trident and the lotus in the same hand. Strength and softness as the same truth. This is rural Indian contemporary art at its deepest: ancient in its roots, entirely present in its urgency, and made by a man who, even with compromised vision and no guarantee of time, chose to keep painting the divine into the world.

That is what every series of Partha Bhattacharjee’s career was, finally, for.

Link to his website: https://parthabhattacharjee.com/