.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Satish Gujral, whose career spanned seven decades, was not only a skilled artist but also a talented and self-taught architect, writer and artisan. Trained in clay molding, metalwork and stone carving, he also studied mural painting in Mexico under the artists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Gujral’s work from the 1950s, sometimes termed his ‘Partition period’, was heavily influenced by social realism and the violence he witnessed in Lahore during the Partition of the Indian subcontinent a few years earlier, and often featured despairing, anguished figures. In the early 1960s, however, following his studies at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on a scholarship from the Mexican government, his visual vocabulary began to evolve and focus on line and texture, rather than figuration. Influenced by mural-making techniques, the artist began to project his ideas through form and design, creating highly abstract figures that emerged from heavily textured surfaces. The present lot, part of a series on the life of Christ, showcases this technique, but also harks back to his earlier work in terms of its narrative of persecution and suffering.
Another major influence on Gujral’s work from this period was an accident he suffered as a child, which led to a complete loss of hearing and several bedridden years. Responding to the solitude of his world, Gujral created dark, almost monochromatic environments that reflected the heavy silence he experienced, and relied on negative space to heighten the sense of loneliness he wanted to convey. The present lot, titled Crucifixion exemplifies the artist’s unique approach. Against an earthy brown and ochre background, an anthropomorphic cross-like form emerges. “Textural impasto of wax and sawdust, build on canvas, form the active foundation for positively defined and structured form. These forms, based upon recognizable images, find on the picture plane a new reality of their own, a new identity, like personages from another world ... the world of silence” (R. Craven, ‘A Short Report on Contemporary Painting in India’, Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3., New York, 1965, p. 230).
A review of Gujral’s 1961 exhibition of his work in New York notes, “There is something hauntingly Indian in his work, although he consciously refuses to exploit traditional Indian styles. Perhaps this quality lies in the dry color, sunburned and gritty, that is dragged across the surface to create a uniform mat texture. His pictures are most impressive when subtleties of color 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 color that are somehow slightly desperate, like a house of cards built before some infinite horizon” (B. O’Doherty, The New York Times, 31 May 1961).
Gujral’s work from the 1950s, sometimes termed his ‘Partition period’, was heavily influenced by social realism and the violence he witnessed in Lahore during the Partition of the Indian subcontinent a few years earlier, and often featured despairing, anguished figures. In the early 1960s, however, following his studies at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on a scholarship from the Mexican government, his visual vocabulary began to evolve and focus on line and texture, rather than figuration. Influenced by mural-making techniques, the artist began to project his ideas through form and design, creating highly abstract figures that emerged from heavily textured surfaces. The present lot, part of a series on the life of Christ, showcases this technique, but also harks back to his earlier work in terms of its narrative of persecution and suffering.
Another major influence on Gujral’s work from this period was an accident he suffered as a child, which led to a complete loss of hearing and several bedridden years. Responding to the solitude of his world, Gujral created dark, almost monochromatic environments that reflected the heavy silence he experienced, and relied on negative space to heighten the sense of loneliness he wanted to convey. The present lot, titled Crucifixion exemplifies the artist’s unique approach. Against an earthy brown and ochre background, an anthropomorphic cross-like form emerges. “Textural impasto of wax and sawdust, build on canvas, form the active foundation for positively defined and structured form. These forms, based upon recognizable images, find on the picture plane a new reality of their own, a new identity, like personages from another world ... the world of silence” (R. Craven, ‘A Short Report on Contemporary Painting in India’, Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 3., New York, 1965, p. 230).
A review of Gujral’s 1961 exhibition of his work in New York notes, “There is something hauntingly Indian in his work, although he consciously refuses to exploit traditional Indian styles. Perhaps this quality lies in the dry color, sunburned and gritty, that is dragged across the surface to create a uniform mat texture. His pictures are most impressive when subtleties of color 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 color that are somehow slightly desperate, like a house of cards built before some infinite horizon” (B. O’Doherty, The New York Times, 31 May 1961).