Song of the Divine

Mrinal Kulkarni looks at the latest set of works by Shobha Broota presented at the Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi. She argues that Shobha shares the sensibility of the Bhakti poets.

‘Song of the Divine’ an exhibition of the latest works by the senior artist Shobha Broota, at Palette Art Gallery in New Delhi asserts Shobha’s importance as a feminine painter in the male bastion of Indian abstraction. Here the feminine is not connoting to homogeneous definition of feminine aesthetics, which includes a tendency to invoke central core imagery, to use forms of overall patterning or decoration and more dispersed compositional structure. But it is related to Shobha Broota’s articulation of concept, imagery and their histories.

This recent set of works by Shobha Broota is a continuation of her quest of the Divine/ spirituality. Unlike her own contemporaries this quest does not lead to the Tantric but it assembles diverse accesses to a phenomenal world that sustains and envelops us primarily through our senses, especially through optical sense. In her paintings colour is infused into a stirred, suspended vision. The colours offer a vibrancy to the visions, coating them with additional textures of patterns and brushstrokes and create a phantasmatic visuals more focused and materialised. Thus she draws the viewer’s gaze into constant movement and touch.

Like the bhakti poets Shobha Broota searches for the divine through a simple pictorial language. She uses the very basic geometric forms to visualise the ‘Unseen’ and thus bring in the ‘Divine’ in the game of gaze/ desire. She bases her visual imageries on this belief that ‘we believe what we see’ in order not to lose (sight of) that to which our visual desire clings. This is exactly the feeling one gets from the poems of Bhakti poets like Jana Bai, Meera Bai, Mukta Bai and Bahina Bai. Like them Shobha Broota also makes the ‘divine’ as an object of desire floating in various significations, which resists the semantic fixation. On the other side the tactility through its vulnerability creates such psychological models in Shobha Broota’s works that it seems to freeze in a state of turmoil. She flirts with the universality of images as well as inscribes her own personal and sensitive gesture upon these images. In doing so she creates a fragile and at the same time, a witty language. This is strongly pronounced in her new works created with wool, beads and metal scrape.

These are exactly the reasons why she is one of the strong feminine artists of Indian abstraction. We can not define her works in any known art historical definitions. She is a musician who has learned all the intricacies of different ragas and creates her own modulations to express the soul of the raga.  She diverts the concept of abstraction as the icon of unitary, single-track modernist Humanism (in Greenbergian sense). Shobha Broota along with Zarina Hashmi and their senior Nasreen Mohammadi are the important painters in contemporary Indian art history for their personal interventions in the realm of abstract art.