Important Notice

Satish Gujral’s time spent in Mexico in the early 1950s was highly influential on his style. He immersed himself in its cultural milieu, spending time with local artists across forms and media. He struck up a friendship with Frida Kahlo and was even one of the pallbearers at her funeral. It was in Mexico that he got the opportunity to work closely with two of Los Tres Grandes (The Big Three) of Mexican mural arts. Gujral worked as an apprentice... Satish Gujral’s time spent in Mexico in the early 1950s was highly influential on his style. He immersed himself in its cultural milieu, spending time with local artists across forms and media. He struck up a friendship with Frida Kahlo and was even one of the pallbearers at her funeral. It was in Mexico that he got the opportunity to work closely with two of Los Tres Grandes (The Big Three) of Mexican mural arts. Gujral worked as an apprentice to David Alfaro Siqueiros and assisted Diego Rivera in making his famous mural at Teatro de los Insurgentes. Both stalwarts expressed their deep appreciation of Gujral’s work in a joint letter stating, “Gujral’s pictorial work appears to us to be of extreme importance, the artist’s youth notwithstanding. We believe that it contains all the essential elements of his nation, the great civilization of his own country. The illustrative sense in the widest meaning of the word, so often found in Indian and Mexican art, appears in his works in a very outstanding manner.” (Rivera and Siqueiros quoted in Gayatri Sinha, Santo Datta and Gautam Bhatia, Satish Gujral: An Artography, New Delhi: Roli Books in arrangement with The Netherlands: Roli & Janssen BV, 2006, p. 25) The scale, grandeur and sense of the epic in their murals impressed themselves upon Gujral and can be observed in his own works.

The year this work was made in, 1986, marked the first time in a decade that Gujral returned to painting. The influence of other mediums and techniques he worked with in the meantime is evident. Like in sculpture, the surface gains importance here. Gujral plays up the textural quality of the work to suggest tactility. Drawing also remained a constant, informing his art as he moved across many forms like painting, sculpture, collage, murals and architecture. Of this practice he said, “A drawing is like a deposit. I might sketch on newspapers or even old envelopes - and then finally take from sketches here and there to make a composition. But if an artist does not pass through an evolutionary phase I would doubt his genuineness.” (Artist quoted in Gayatri Sinha, Satish Gujral: Drawings and Collages, New Delhi: Roli Books in arrangement with Roli & Janssen, 2001, p. 12)

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