Rameshwar Broota’s Recent Photographs in ‘Open Enclosures’ February 11, 2011

New Delhi: Veteran artist Rameshwar Broota will show over 20 large size recent photographs in a show titled “Open Enclosures” at Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam from February 12, 2011 till February 21. The show will then move to Vadehra Art Gallery in D-178, Okhla Phase I from March 6 till March 31, 2011.

All these photographs are intricately textured pictures with the minutest of detail poring out of each frame. “The scale of these photographs is much larger than my art show. The exhibition is also more earthy this time,” says Broota, 69, “there are far more open spaces and fewer objects. The emphasis is on the details, just the way I have in my paintings.”

And detailed they are indeed. A seven-feet long untitled photograph of a dried up river bed, which Broota shot near Spiti in Himachal, contains a landscape that is barren yet stunning. Devoid of any human element, what captures attention is the satire with which the artist captures a donkey and a tractor in the same picture, both isolated from the landscape they belong to.

Construction overdrive in his favourite land of Himachal seems to have inspired some other works as well. A top angle photograph of a mountain side in Himachal, cluttered with houses, is so fine in detailing that it appears almost like a miniature painting. A completely different photograph, titled Where Does The Ganga Flow, of a chaotically developed Hardwar, taken once again as a top angle shot, show his knack of capturing both the overt subject and the hidden story. Some of the most evocative photographs titled What Lies Beneath which are tight close ups of human hand and feet, showing every line, crease and wrinkle adorned with just a drop of water and in some cases, blood! “This could be earth, an animal skin or even a rock,” he says of the graphical series of works which almost blur the line between what is human and what is not.

Renowned for his strong masculine forms in paintings which on close examination are actually immensely intricate monumental drawings, Broota now imparts a similar sensibility to his photographs as well, although with a twist. The human forms in his photographs - like the diptych titled No Dog, No Elephant, No Mouse in which a half-covered faceless human body dreams away as a plane zooms off into the horizon above her window, or one in which a man looms large over a cluttered city of Greece in a work titled No Man, No Horse, No Parrot – are superbly juxtaposed with aerial shots that defy regular compositions.

An artist and filmmaker whose works are hot-listed in auctions and find space in some of the most respected galleries and museums across the world and who has the honour of having received several national awards, Broota’s metamorphosis into a photographer is bound to be another lesson in art history – especially for the scores of artists who study under him at Triveni Kala Sangam, whose HOD Broota has been since 1967!