Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Fine Arts | June 2017

70 Rameshwar Broota (b.1941) Grappling with School Lessons Oil on canvas scraped with blade, 1995 S/d ‘Rameshwar Broota 1995’ on verso Inscribed ‘RAMESHWAR BROOTA 1995 GRAPPILING WITH SCHOOL LESSONS Oil on canvas SCRAPED WITH BLADE’ on verso 24.4 x 22.2 in (62.0 x 56.5 cm) Provenance Acquired from Christie’s New York, 23rd March 2010 Sale (Lot 36) by present owner. INR 2,400,000 – 3,600,000 USD 35,294 – 52,941 The painter is by now supreme for his brevity, of statement and also able to grasp the smallest detail with a hawk’s eye. But we may well ask, all that painstaking labour in aid of what cause? – those states of inward being writ large as life. Sharp indeed is the edge of his visual designs and quite like those of a honed scimitar. And he dividing and ruling his canvas most like a master strategist, ushers us before what is essential and not a mite more, not a dot in excess in any work. But still the feeling of incompleteness does not arise even from so cut to the bone a reality; rather, one magically seems to stand before a whole. Each of the portions, in his pictorial configurations, would seem to vibrate in unison, and our viewers eye does not even for a moment have to wander over the canvas in search of a work’s ostensible purport. Rather, the eye is spellbound, the impact of what is presented, overcoming us most like a tidal wave. The painter, full of the vital abundance of his inner knowledge of what is what, penetrates into the meaning of those of his subjects that inhabit his imagination. Keshav Malik from ‘In Step with the Tortoise’ , rpt. in Rameshwar Broota: Shridharani-Vadehra ExC. 2001. Broota’s central subject is man, through whose tensions and aspirations, lusts and endeavours, the greater issues of life are mediated. God is indifferent or distant, the human ‘other’ is absent; the solitary male becomes the site for conflict and resolution. Through repeated acts of resistance, the male body, with its skeletal frame or stolid musculature, plays out its postures of acceptance or confrontation. Gayatri Sinha rpt in Sridharini Gallery ExC 2001. Indian Modern Fine Arts | 147