Lot 256: RAMESHWAR BROOTA (B.1941)

RAMESHWAR BROOTA (B.1941) PROJECTIONS Signed and dated 'R Broota/ RAMESHWAR BROOTA, 1976, Oil on canvas' on reverse Oil on canvas 69 1/2 by 48 3/4 in. (176.5 by 123.7 cm.)

Since the beginning of his career, Rameshwar Broota has scrutinized the human condition. His early paintings from the 1960s depicted Delhi's itinerant laborers, despairing men who left their villages for the capital, in hopes of achieving a daily wage.

By the late 1970s, his figures became humanized gorillas, including the current work from his Gorilla Series (1976-80) – satirical paintings which reveal the artist's obsession with the delicate balance between man's fragile morality and violent simian nature.

"Like the youth of the 1960s, [Broota's] protest at the greed and corruption in contemporary society was forcefully expressed through his satirical imagery. In his early works are [largely] satirical, and with sharp ironical commentary on the social environment. The undernourished, fragile figures of his earlier paintings gradually morphed into voluptuous, hybrid Gorilla-like figures. In his Gorilla Series – which spanned ten years from 1970 to 1979 – Broota's deep sensitivity and concern towards the stark materialism that was encompassing the society was reflected [in his work]." (http://www.artinasia.com)

"The butt of Broota's attack, the political establishment had enhanced its powers through abolition of privy purses, bank nationalization and the successful liberation of Bangladesh. It was the height of the license Raj, of the empowered bureaucrat and lavish public consumption. Towards the middle of the [1970s] however, the realization that the [gorillas] with their gargantuan appetites were essentially too close to the Indian political reality and that they lacked universality, presaged change. Gradually this mockery of the inversions of power began to play itself out. Coming in the wake of the Emergency, such paintings define public response to political events as passive or completely absent. The figures become miniaturized and stick-like, seemingly adrift on the vast expanse of the canvas." (Gayatri Sinha, "Edge of the Precipice: The Art of Rameshwar Broota," Outlook India, 13 December 2001)