Sorrow

"Mr. Gujral is a young Indian painter whose pictures concern themselves with the dialogue between single tragic figures and buildings set down around them with all the apparent solidity of a stated fact. This dark, parched environment is part of a locked-in world, in which figures and buildings stand among the soundless fall of shadows, so that our inspection seems like a trespass. There is something hauntingly Indian in his work, although he consciously refuses to exploit traditional Indian styles. Perhaps this quality lies in the dry colour, sunburned and gritty, that is dragged across the surface to create a uniform mat texture.

His pictures are most impressive when subtleties of colour begin to play across this harsh surface like hints of a mirage in a dry desert. But these pictures have an elusive quality that retreats into profundity as you attempt to grasp it. They involve one more and more, so that eventually their seeming solidity dissolves into sliding planes of colour that are somehow slightly desperate, like a house of cards built before some infinite horizon." (B. O'Doherty, New York Times, 31 May 1961, published in Satish Gujral, exhibition catalogue, Forum Gallery, New York, 1964, unpaginated)