Rameshwar Broota

Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection

Jhaveri, A., A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, p. 23 illus.

Good overall condition. Slight buckling of canvas, upper right corner.
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'Rameshwar Broota’s Man has, over a period of time, expressed existential anxiety, satire, heroism, and more recently decay.  The male nude has shadowed the artist, from his early youth through creative maturity and middle age.' (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, p. 22).

For the first ten years after graduating from the Delhi School of Art, Broota focused his attention on the corruption and social injustices endemic in Delhi's political society. By the early 1970s he decided to take a different tack. "I thought that this kind of subject is very local, very personal, and art has to go beyond this. It has to have a kind of universality, so that whoever sees it, it should belong to that person." (Yashodhara Dalmia, Journeys: Four Generations of Indian Artists in their Own Words, New Delhi, 2011, vol. 2, p. 83).

By the 1980s, Broota began using the male figure as his subject, often using his own body as a model to develop a unique technique, which involved applying multiple thin layers of muted colours which he would then manipulate by scratching the surface using linseed oil. This new method was discovered almost by chance when working on a spoilt canvas. Broota covered an old canvas with monochromatic tones and scraped it with the edge of a knife.  Soon he began using a knife and blade to etch the surface and reveal old layers of paint underneath. This highly personalized practice, less painterly in application, has the quality of an early etching, the end result resembling a monumental x-ray. The discovery was important because he carves out his images, going from one stage to the other without depending on any kind of preparatory sketches on paper. On close examination, his large canvases are in fact, immensely intricate drawings. The current work from 1983 belongs to this later phase where his focus remains on man, but wounded, hardened and somehow dehumanized.

"I just took the canvas, stood before the large mirror without clothes, started just doing scratching, scraping with it, and then from morning till evening, I continuously painted... because that had to be finished when it’s wet... I was dreaming throughout the night, it was such a tortuous night... as if I was scraping my own body with the knife... to reveal this thing..." (ibid., pp.89-90).