Sathish Gujral: a silence that exploded

Explore the centenary retrospective of Satish Gujral, showcasing his powerful artistry born from silence and profound personal experiences.

At the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi, modern artist Satish Gujral’s centenary retrospective opens with a video of a river rushing between rocks, and his voice recalling the swimming accident in Kashmir’s Lidder river that took his hearing at eight. “The pain was traumatic. It numbed my senses. Slowly, it took away my hearing.”

Then the galleries open, and the exhibition Satish Gujral 100 never stops insisting on more, refusing to resolve. Paintings, sculptures, burnt wood, tapestries, murals, architectural models, erotic compositions, horses, zebras, late luminous canvases full of rams and arced forms, made after a cochlear implant briefly returned his hearing. Over 160 works, seven decades, and every medium imaginable. The concentrated output of a mind for whom silence made the world explode outward into form, surface, weight, a voracious insistence on making.

The video of a river rushing between rocks

Exhibits at Satish Gujral 100 | Photo Credit: Sachin Soni

The range hits you as affect — as pressure and sensation on the body — before it hits you as biography. Pain, whimsy, ego, arrogance, guilt, anger, eroticism, nostalgia for the future — it is all here, arriving simultaneously. Then the thought arrives as punctuation: all of this was made in silence. The restlessness of a man moving through every medium he could reach tells you that one lifetime was not enough.

Satish Gujral 100 at the NGMA