MUMBAI: Artist Satish Gujral (1925–2020) was the OG multi-hyphenate. His 100-year retrospective, ‘The Modernist Returns: Satish Gujral 100,’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai, will offer a glimpse into the prolific career of one of the most dynamic modernists of India. He painted, sculpted, made murals and designed buildings.
In 1998, underwent a cochlear implant surgery in Australia to restore his hearing, but had the implant removed two years after. But after the Delhi riots of 1984, his works changed. At age eight, he lost his ability to hear post a swimming accident in Kashmir.
He charted his own path and on his own terms. He chose silence over chaos and poetry became his music. KG fondly remembers how Gujral would commence and end all his meetings with an Urdu poetry. “I never saw him as somebody who was guided by silence. One can see a more direct reference to this in his paintings with Sufi figures in the 2000s. KG believes that up until the ’70s, Gujral was looking back at the past. That’s when he starts making sculptures out of brunt wood. The twisted forms recall the horror of rubber tires thrown at Sikhs to set them on fire. “Gujral lived through it and decided to not let humanity forget its horrors. That really is the mark of a master artist. He just doesn’t create beautiful memories but also powerful, important ones that are sealed in the history of one’s country,” adds KG. Gujral’s works illustrate these in great detail, which makes his retrospective an important show of our times, brought to the city by the Gujral Foundation and Sangita Jindal’s JSW Foundation.
Poetry guided his life and most of his art,” says KG. “Satish ji stood apart by his fearlessness and a creative instinct, constantly questioning, experimenting and finding new forms of expression,” says Jindal.
