Lot 11 represents a very a rare oil on canvas work by the artist, using the palette knife in the thick impasto expressionist style.

“Whereas his drawings are haunting and evocative in their directness and immediacy, the paintings generally display a rhythmic pattern. While he did sometimes rise to great painterly heights, he usually seemed to be in a great hurry to capture the moment of inspiration. The medium of oil however demands greater patience. Still it is interesting to observe his rhythmic approach. The swirling brush strokes in a blue and black moonlight landscape or the vertical strokes delineating a mass of figures are arresting. The daubs of red or blue, green or orange illuminate the dark tones of his colour drawings. But it is ultimately the pain and angst of the drawings that create the greatest impact. Nikhil Biswas’s painting career spanned only 13 years. But in that time he left an indelible imprint on the contemporary art scene of Calcutta.”

But, Nikhil’s sweet nostalgia disappeared. He said, ‘The picturesque, almost idyllic world of my boyhood days was shattered one day. I could see similarities of events I read or heard about with the ones I had experienced. I will never forget the overcrowded train we took on our way to Majdiah during the War and frightened faces of those fleeing from the city. Just the other day, I was reading a reminiscence of a survivor. He describes how the Gestapo had herded Jewish people into goods trains, packed them in like sardines and sent them off to the concentration camps like Belsen. Think of the slave ships from Africa and Asia during the Western dominance. These are certain underlying themes I have tried to explore in my mature works. Artists of my generation, some of them at least, had gone through the same kind of social circumstances that I experienced and their works show the same set of concerns. Their search for apt imagery and form are similar to mine.

Lonely as I am in this wide world, I see how this spirit of loneliness has infected the mood of our modern artists and coloured their works. I also feel that the themes of my works are slowly attaining an intellectual aspect… But I am after an aspect that should be perceptual. I want to enjoy myself in my art. I want to live peacefully and hopefully with the inmates of my soul. I want to delineate truth in the background of eternal and universal values, the intrinsic nature of which remains ever unchanged despite its metamorphosis. This is the agonizing problem before the artist today.

In 2006, the artist achieved a new high in the auction market with the sale of Crucifixion (1965), offered in the Forty Masterpieces Museum Quality Series VII by Osian's, which concluded on 09 September 2006 at Mumbai, achieving a sale price of ₹33,60,000 ($72,617). This record marked a defining moment in the artist's market history, reflecting both the significance of the artwork and its reception within the broader art world.

Biswas drew clowns in strong stark profiles or caught unguarded in a frontal view, or standing beside a strange curtain. Biswas’s clown is a brutish figure, half man and half animal. He crouches and slumps in a chair, the face more of a monkey than a man. A naked bulb hangs in the empty room to emphasise his alienation. Biswas’s clown stands or drops at the stage entrance, a forlorn or dejected figure. He wears the hat and his clothes as part of a fabulous masquerade of society, its hypocrisy. There is a note of self-identity which is further emphasised in his own statement: ‘Yes, it is the problem of de-humanisation that confronts us. I am no introvert, for in that case I would have had nothing to complain of. I see how I am being denuded of humanity in spite of my intimate connection with human beings.’

In 1967, Nikhil Bishwas Retrospective Exhibition showing 235 works marked a major milestone in the exhibition history of Nikhil Biswas, offering a retrospective survey of the artist's artistic production

In 1992, Nikhil Bishwas Retrospective marked a major milestone in the exhibition history of Nikhil Biswas, offering a retrospective survey of the artist's artistic production