New Delhi, Feb 4 (PTI) A new exhibition, titled "Gujral Within: An Introspection", here at Bikaner House brings together a body of original works by multidisciplinary artist Satish Gujral that have never been publicly exhibited before.
Drawn entirely from the private collection of the artist's daughter and interior designer Raseel Gujral, the exhibition by Raseel Gujral Art Legacy and Dhoomimal Art Centre features paintings, drawings, and sculptures, focusing largely on the final decade of Gujral's artistic practice.
Even as the preoccupations that shaped Gujral’s practice, including identity, displacement, political conscience, architecture, and the human condition, continue to surface here, the works reflect an artist who no longer sought to persuade or explain, but to observe, refine and hold complexity with restraint.
“The works presented here have never been exhibited before. They were not produced for public view, but emerged from an inward necessity where making functioned as an assertion of existence. Compelled by silence, Gujral created it as a way of leaving proof of being through form,” Raseel Gujral said in the curatorial note.
The exhibition, she added, articulates what she inherited from her father and the artist "as an internal vocabulary rather than an archive: a grammar of restraint, an ethics of material, and a way of listening before declaring”.
The works in Panchtantra series reimagine his early explorations in drawing and collage through the lens of folklore and myth. The series reflects Gujral's fascination with the intertwined forms of humans and animals.
While the Liberty series is a continuation of Gujral’s exploration of the human-animal relationship, particularly the horse, the Industry series is a meditation on the evolving relationship between man and machine.
“For my father, art was not meant for intellectual dissection or consumption. The work was complete once the form had found its integrity. Its purpose was not explanation, but to encounter an engagement with the viewer’s own sensibility and state of being.
“Accordingly, the exhibition does not attempt to analyse or interpret. It simply invites the viewer to immerse, engage and absorb the work on their own terms allowing meaning to arise through presence rather than instruction,” Raseel Gujral said.
As part of the exhibition, five works have been selected to be released as a centenary limited edition series.
These editions are drawn from works that have not been previously editioned and are being introduced for the first time.
Issued as a reproduction on “museum grade archival paper”, the first edition comprises nine reproductions per artwork, with a total of 99 per work to be released in measured phases over time.
The exhibition comes to a close on February 12.