Accompanied by aABOUT Bharati Sagar
A dominantly figurative artist, her works reflect her angst and experiences, happy emotions and nostalgic sentiments as well as her empirical experiences of the world and life observed around her.
At the heart of her works lies the concept of time and space, a palimpsest which conceals through layers of her veiled imagery and transparent brush strokes those memories that ultimately find
realization in the correspondence of its translation as time and space. Her attraction to the language of human forms was the power of images as opposed to the specific meaning of the depicted subject. Time and space through which she corroborates is assimilated into a visual language of either complex or simple patterns serving as building blocks for her expressions of emotions, sentiments and feelings.
Among her range of works, there are a few series that show her conceptual strength and crafty artistry. The ‘Boxed in’ Series is one of the prominently striking works, The strange, uncomfortable postures, technique of engaging the brush strokes in creating mottled effects, the thin transparent veils of tonalities sweeping over the forms, the dark pessimistic gloomy black tones offer a rich gamut of psychological, emotional, physical unhappiness and angst of women deprived of their voice, dignity and independence. The representation of each form in this series has a narrative to convey, which Bharati has done with clarity. Her tonalities are similar to the Japanese concept of
Notan, the balance of light and dark. her monk series explicitly reveal her engagement with light to create a sense of mystery as well as contemplative serenity. Space maintains a close relation with illusionism, narrative, and the performative qualities of art. The spatial element in her works reinforces the narrative content with forms either cloistered heavily or creating free movement. The concept of space in her abstracts creates the visual balance of positive and negative space, in which the element of the duality cannot exist without the other making both necessary. The negative spaces or those spaces between her forms, enhance her abstraction enriching the beauty of her
composition and conveys it with dynamism.
Along her artistic journey, which began in 1960 (British Institute while at school in Bombay) and then in 1966 from The Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Art and Architecture, Hyderabad. She has bagged the
prestigious Lalit kala Academy State award, Lalit kala Prishad Award and The Chitrakala Parishad Awards in 1987,88 and 1989 respectively in AP.
