With the death of Rajendra Dhawan in Paris recently, contemporary Indian Art lost one of its leading expat abstract artists. Though active in art for a long time, he had started making a mark in the Indian art market in the last decade with his landscapes that were infused with the energy of intense brushstrokes, and his art evoked an emotional response amongst his contemporaries such as Prabhakar Kolte.
Perhaps the highlight of his body of work was that it moved effortlessly between referentiality and formless non-referentiality. Though there were no forms in the abstraction of nature, nevertheless, through the fluid compositions and divisions skilled use of tones he could create a reference to an object-image such as a silhouette of a feminine torso, or the gushing waters of a fast flowing river or surging snows in a snowstorm, and the ghostly trees in a dusky forest. One shall miss his ability to evoke the essence, the rasa, of pure emotion through his paintings.
The art fraternity is also paying tribute to Farhan Mujib through a retrospective of his works to mark the anniversary of his death through Gallery Apparao. Mujib was a physicist at the Aligarh Muslim University with the soul of an artist. He was one of the foremost collagists of post modern art who combined the traditional sensibilities of a miniaturist and a sophisticated aesthetic sense with the precision of a watchmaker in the creation of his collages. His painted collages reverberate with the bright colours of Mughal and Rajput miniature paintings, with ultramarine blue standing out as a defining hue.
There are references to the Nimmat Nama, to Laur Chanda, to Pegasus, to children’s stories and to a magical, imagined world uniquely his own. His architectural works invoke the world of Urdu poetry, of Awadhi culture, of bygone heritage and mythological structures through the juxtaposition of images such as that of spindle legged furniture, mihrabs and flying horses.
— Dr Seema Bawa is an art historian,
curator and critic