Author: Satish Gujral
Editor: Uma Vasudev / Gayatri Sinha
Publisher: Roli Books
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8174361839
Description
An offering in the pocket art series, this set of 3 books with a life sketch of the artist and a short text on his work carries a selection of 72 four-color reproductions of his paintings, sculptures, Drawings and Collages.
Of all the leading Indian contemporaries, Satish Gujral has the most diverse oeuvre, extending from painting to ceramic, collage, sculpture, murals and architecture. The common thread running this multiple activity is his drawing.
PAINTINGS:
Satish Gujral is an autobiographical painter. Whatever he or anyone else may write about his life and work is only incidental to the way his paintings sp-speak of his pain, his agony, his insights, his monumental affirmations, his expanding horizons, his visions about what life and death are all about. What we see in Gujral's work is the span of life, never just the arrested moment of creativity. That is why he is prolific, but never monotonous. In more than fifty years of his life as a painter, Satish Gujral has experimented with a range of material and texture, but even within each area, the experiment with form has taken innumerable flights.
There has been three dominant periods; the first - the period of the Partition paintings. Here, the subject was the human form. The second dominant period was of his 'brunt' wood creations - paintings in three-dimensional charcoal brown with dots of red and whimsicalities that evoke the flavor of folk. Satish Gujral is now in the midst of life. His present phase is not only of joy. It is a celebration. While his earliest paintings were in oil, there is now superb craftmanship in the use of acrylic with its shaded nuances and joyous fusions. The paintings center round images of man, woman, animals, and plants and virtually pulsate with rhythm.
SCULPTURES:
Writing in first person, Satish says: " Whatever the medium, art, for me, is an expression of the adventures and discoveries of mankind as it reacts to an environment that demands perpetual readjustment between habit and the process of changing facts … An artist, to my mind, has objectives: he attempts to reproduce the outer and/or inner meaning of the appearance of things - using individually conceived forms that are the products of his experience, feeling, or imagination - to express his aesthetic ideas and emotions in the medium employed..
DRAWINGS and COLLAGES:
Satish Gujral lived and worked in Mexico, from 1952-54 as the apprentice of the famed Mexican muralist David Alfara Sequiros. On his return, he executed a mural in Gandhi Bhavan, Punjab University, Chandigarh. This single work signaled the end of his Partition Phase. His drawings of the period had a muralesque monumentally in their scope, if not their size. Large animal forms, diminutive humans or figures in energetic sexual play were vigorously executed. From this early phase of a tempestuous draughtsman ship, Gujral moved rapidly into the area of paper collage. His collages were based on the drawings of the mid 1960s. At the time, no contemporary artist had exploited the possibilities of collage. Within the collages he made a small series titled Playmates in which the dodging energy of childhood, and fluid bend of forms of animals at play, is evident
Of all the leading Indian contemporaries, Satish Gujral has the most diverse oeuvre, extending from painting to ceramic, collage, sculpture, murals and architecture. The common thread running this multiple activity is his drawing.