Time and Time again

Time and Time Again presents the remarkable artistic journey of Bhupen Bhatt - painter, printmaker, and photographer whose practice spanned much of the second half of the 20th century. His life and work belong to a crucial moment in India’s cultural history, when artists were negotiating questions of tradition, modernity, and identity in a rapidly transforming, post-Independence landscape.

At the heart of this volume are Bhatt’s photographs, which not only document the cultural complexities of Indian art and its makers but also offer a deeply personal, nuanced self-portrait of the artist. Sensitive, witty, and full of empathy, his images speak to both the emotional and intellectual aspects of the human condition. Combining the academic with the accidental, the poetic with the postmodern, his work expanded the very definition of photography within Indian art.

Rejecting hierarchies, Bhatt’s practice collapsed binaries such as ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, rural and urban, indigenous and internationalist, paving the way for a more egalitarian and investigative visual language. As art historian Shukla Sawant notes, he was “omnivorous in his visual appetite,” deftly shuffling the influences of cubism, abstract expressionism, pop art, and local traditions to dissolve the rigid categories imposed by art history.

Richly illustrated and critically insightful, Time and Time Again is both a tribute and a testament to an artist whose work continues to challenge, inspire, and redefine the boundaries of modern Indian art.