Rameshwar Broota

Rameshwar Broota was born in Delhi in 1941 and graduated in fine arts from the College of Art in Delhi in 1964. Soon afterwards he took charge of the art department at Triveni Kala Sangam, the arts centre in New Delhi (sources give 1964 and 1967), and he has run it ever since.

His first well-known pictures, through the 1970s, are of apes. They are colourful, anthropomorphised and often funny, and the joke has teeth: in Anatomy of that Old Story (1970) a grinning ape sits over a full plate while two hungry men look on. Critics read the series as satire on greed and on the gap between the fed and the hungry.

By the end of the decade the apes had given way to men. In 1978, scraping away a daub of paint he had put down by mistake, he found the method he has used since: several wet layers of colour on the canvas, then a blade drawn across the surface to scrape the top layers away until the image comes up from underneath. The results look less painted than excavated, with the grain of an old photograph.

The subject since then has been the male body and its vulnerabilities. In 2014 the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art opened a retrospective of fifty years of the work, Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body. He showed Scripted in Time at Vadehra Art Gallery in 2018 and a sequel in 2019, and in 2020 presented the Man series as a digital exhibition.