Important Notice

“I want to go to spaces that are unseen, unknown, the so-called unconscious. But, the conscious and the unconscious exist side by side for me. When something happens or unfurls on the surface, it may seem accidental, but in reality, it has been cooking just beneath for a long time. As in Nature, nothing is an accident for me.” - RAMESHWAR BROOTA

Though Rameshwar Broota began his artistic career as an academic portraitist, his work... “I want to go to spaces that are unseen, unknown, the so-called unconscious. But, the conscious and the unconscious exist side by side for me. When something happens or unfurls on the surface, it may seem accidental, but in reality, it has been cooking just beneath for a long time. As in Nature, nothing is an accident for me.” - RAMESHWAR BROOTA

Though Rameshwar Broota began his artistic career as an academic portraitist, his work quickly evolved into more stylised renderings of the figure to develop an idiom that was more in tune with his artistic vision. Deeply aware of and affected by socio-political developments, Broota’s primitive figuration explores socio-political realities, pre-social existence, and the possibility of post-social man as a critique of economic and political corruption, and the excesses that cause it.

His art is primarily consumed by the human condition and the individual’s relationship and power struggle with a developing India, rife with the conflict of post-colonialism - as indicated by his works from the mid-1960s onwards. “Broota had already moved away from the thick impasto of his early portraits to a condensed narration, his tall canvases now filled with larger than-life figures of laborers, minutely capturing the last surviving shreds of life existing in their weathered bodies and tense muscles. He was thus representing the neglected and marginalised with heroic dimensions, poetic justice if you like… In their pictorial treatment, he thinned down the oil paint and its consistency to get a watercolor like effect, creating a transparency that made the painted bodies of the deprived lose their weight and fleshiness. The paled skin tones... came to represent the anemic condition of his protagonists.” (Roobina Karode, Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body, New Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2014, online)

The present lot is an early work, painted well before Broota began his move away from portraiture towards “making stark paintings of emaciated men.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, 2005, p. 22) Portraying a female figure in deep contemplation, this oil on canvas reinforces what Broota’s art ultimately relies on - “stark simplicity, brevity of statement, and impeccable grasp of detail; and it is these elements, rather than any overarching ideology or aesthetic doctrine, that makes it as powerful as it is.” (Jhaveri, p. 23)

Broota and the father of the owner of the present lot used to paint together in the early 1960s. It was on account of this friendship that the artist gifted the painting to him. The work has been in the family ever since.

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