Lot 27: * TP Rameshwar Broota (India, b. 1941) Metamorphosis - II

Rameshwar Broota (India, b. 1941)
Metamorphosis - II Signed 'R Broota' and further inscribed RAMESHWAR BROOTA/METAMORPHOSIS-(II)/1984/TRIVENI KALA SANGAM/N. DELHI- 110001 on reverse Oil on canvas128 x 178cm (50 3/8 x 70 1/16in).

Provenance:Private Collection, Dubai.A highly acclaimed figure of Indian Contemporary art, Rameshwar Broota was born in New Delhi in 1941 and continues to work and live there. After graduating in Fine Arts from the Delhi College of Art in 1963, he began lecturing at a number of institutions including his alma mater and Jamia Milia Islamia, before focusing on his own artistic practice. He has been heading the department of Art at Triveni Kala Sangam since 1984. Broota's oeuvre shows his engagement with various subjects, styles and mediums to produce work spanning a career of over five decades. Broota began his artistic career as a portrait artist in the early 1960s and slowly migrated to figurative paintings of marginalised classes of society to highlight concerns like materialism, corruption and socioeconomic injustice. In the 1970s, he employed satire in his work through his recurring motif of humanoid apes to contribute to these narratives. The ape like figure was a visual and social metaphor for the immoral and privileged social and political elite. There was a fresh departure in his works in the 1980s, Broota used a monochromatic palette and rigorously started painting the male body, to suggest both masculine strength and vulnerability. It was during this time that he invented his unique technique of painting in which he applies layers of paint on the surface and then scratches through them to reveal images and display various textures. Metamorphosis II is from Broota's 'Man Series' but coincidentally shares the same name as the artists next series, 'Metamorphosis'. This meticulously painted phallic structure renders anatomical details such as veins and flesh, suggesting his artistic intention to represent the fragility and femininity of the male body and form. Broota is preoccupied with the disembodiment of the male nude, painting close ups of body parts such as a face, hand, torso or phallus, and the abstraction of the figurative. This earlier intimate depiction of the phallus paves a path for the phallic sensuality that follows in his work through motifs like flaccid presence of fingers or erect metallic objects in his future works. Critics have also compared these phallic symbols to the linga- the Hindu symbol of Lord Shiva's energy."His art was now centred on Man and his existential angst...The emphasis from the external beauty of the male torso and its perfect contours gradually shifted to transmutations and an inner conflict, with Broota's 'man' facing the ambivalence of body and being, spirit and matter, fragility and resilience. With trepidations of age, time, death, and disintegration, one encounters the growing presence of male vulnerability in Broota that pushes his heroic (male) to often acquire an anti-heroic position."(Roobina Karode, Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art exhibition cataogue, 2015)