Visual Arts Library
Shrine
Artist: Satish Gujral
Date:
1956
Medium: Acrylic on board
Dimensions: n.a.
Event: India - Pakistan Partition
Dissatisfied with some Indian artists' tendency to directly adopt the techniques and vocabulary of European Expressionism and Cubism, Satish Gujral strives to utilize a kind of public modernism rooted in Indian traditions. In his works, he includes elements of what he considers to be living and life-giving in the traditional arts and crafts of India. Social content dominates his paintings and graphics, and the anguish of the millions who lost their homes and families during the partition of his country comes out in the angry, sweeping gestural brushwork of his paintings.
The sullen brooding anger born of incomprehension exuded by the larger-than-life men and women in Satish Gujral's paintings has been attributed to the influence of the Mexican muralists Orozco and Sequiros, with whom Gujral studied in Mexico. It was here that he cultivated his longtime desire to create accessible works that would portray powerful themes relevant to the masses. After his training in Mexico he was more fitted to express the horrendous actuality of what he had witnessed in a Punjab that had been torn apart. Gujral notes of his personal experience of Partition: "My father and I were forced to stay and forced to be witnesses to this ghastly play which repeated each episode with an increasingly grisly ferocity as if aiming at the total annihilation of all sensual capacities in its audience."
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