Painting: Panchmukhi II

Five faces look outward in five directions, and the world is held between them. The Panchamukha form of Hanuman is among the most cosmologically complete images in the devotional tradition, each face presiding over a different direction, each a different aspect of divine power gathered into a single body. Bharat Tripathi renders this form not through the layered iconography of temple sculpture but through the compressed, direct language of contemporary painting, where the multiplicity of faces becomes a formal problem solved with compositional clarity rather than decorative accumulation. The result is a figure that is recognisably ancient in its subject and entirely present in its execution.The five heads are not arranged to overwhelm. They are held within the composition with the same quality of contained force that characterises all of Tripathi's figures in the Anjaneya Series: power that does not need to announce itself, presence that fills the frame without crowding it. The contemporary style invites the viewer to encounter a form they may already know through an unfamiliar visual register, stripped of the emblematic detail that can sometimes place devotional imagery at a distance and returned instead to its essential charge. This is Hanuman not as a sacred diagram but as a living presence, multiplied not to intimidate but to encompass. This work was exhibited as part of the Anjaneya Series at Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai in September 2025, a body of paintings that engages the devotional tradition with the full resources of contemporary figurative art. Painted in acrylic on canvas, it asks the viewer to look at something familiar and see it newly.

Why This Artwork Stands Out

• The five-headed form, traditionally rendered in sculptural or diagrammatic terms, is here translated into contemporary figurative painting, creating a visual encounter rather than an iconographic reference.
• The compositional handling of five faces within a single painted field demonstrates a formal intelligence that makes the theological content and the artistic structure inseparable from one another.
• The restraint of the contemporary style removes the distance that elaborate devotional iconography can create, making the figure's presence immediate and unmediated.
• As part of the Anjaneya Series shown at Jehangir Art Gallery, this work belongs to a sustained and critically engaged body of paintings that repositions Hanuman within the vocabulary of modern Indian art.

Handle with care. Do not handle the painted area with bare hands. Handle with gloves. Do not let the picture come into contact with moisture or high humidity. Do not expose to direct sunlight. Use a soft-bristle brush to gently clean the painting.