Born in 1930, Nikhil Biswas completed his diploma in Fine Arts from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Kolkata. A founder of the Calcutta Group of Painters and the Society of Contemporary Artists, Kolkata, the late artist dealt with reality per se and portrayed images that showed the essential loneliness of the human spirit. In the midst of the abstractionist wave that was influencing the artists of the '60s, Nikhil Biswas's work was a testimony to humanistic ethics. Filled as much with gestures of struggle or pain, as they were with the rebellion against the very suffering they depicted, the paintings were deeply related to his moods.

His quest for the root of our existence led him to a point where he felt t...