RAMESHWAR BROOTA | Anatomy of that Old Story

Acquired directly from the artist at Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi, 14 January 1987

R. Karode, Rameshwar Broota: Interrogating the Male Body, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2015, illustration pp. 48, 227

Exhibition Catalogue, Counterparts: Recent Paintings by Rameshwar Broota, Vadehra Publishing, New Delhi, 2009, illustration p. 72

K. Malik and G. Sinha, Rameshwar Broota, Vadehra Publishing, New Delhi, 2001, illustration p. 32

Since the beginning of his career, Rameshwar Broota has scrutinized the human condition. His early paintings from the 1960s as we see in lot 18 were based on portraiture. Thereafter in his late 1960s paintings, he depicted Delhi's itinerant labourers, despairing men who left their villages for the capital, in hopes of achieving a daily wage. By the 1970s, his figures became anthropomorphised apes, including the current work from his Ape Series – satirical paintings that reveal the artist's obsession with the delicate balance between man's fragile morality and bestial simian id.

'In his paintings from the 1970s, the uncanny reveals itself in the figure of an ape, in which satire is used to remind viewers that humans are in fact animals. In the hands of Broota, satire isn’t a mere allegory but a way to reveal the “familiar” as a discomforting reality of the world we live in…This ape-like creature is a recurring motif in Broota’s paintings, be it in a group seated at a table having tea, or as a couple on a sofa in a plush, bourgeois setting. Ape-like creatures and headless figures in his other drawings from the same period add to one’s viewing experience of the morbid portrayed in Broota’s narratives of socioeconomic injustice.' (M. Thirukode, ‘Visions Of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body, Rameshwar Broota’, Art Asia Pacific, March – April 2015, http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/92/RameshwarBroota) 

Broota engaged with this theme for ten years. Speaking of this work, Roobina Karode elaborates ‘The initial works of the Ape Series consisted of bold, bulky forms dominating the picture plane often rendered in awkward angles and bright colours. Anatomy of that Old Story (1970) can be termed as the first work executed in this series…The artist depicts himself as a bearded, scrawny (with an exposed rib cage) young lad accompanied by his artist friend K. Khosa, both immersed in the throes of gluttony. Hungry, they watch excessive food consumed by the insatiable greed of the awkward looking figure.’ (R. Karode, ‘Ape/Man,’ Rameshwar Broota: Interrogating the Male Body, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, 2015, p. 41)

The current painting like others in the series is large in scale and depicts life-sized figures which bring a sense of immediacy to the work as if the viewer can walk into the tableau.