This exposition affords a bird’s eye-view of the select works of Shobha Broota from the beginnings of her artistic career--early nineteen sixties, to the present moment. And, as it is with all persevering painters, her artistic profile over time is seen to become ever more inevitable, painstakingly honed to a razor fine. If then we were also to note certain variations, in media or genre, in the body of her metier, such imaginal shifts would appear, all the more to have led to a singularity, a subtlety, as well as simplicity in the working out of her subsequent compositions, so much so as to betoken an enviable mastery of the crafting of a meaningful art. So then, at the apex of the works, we can without demur murmur: the artist lives by the ado that ‘ripeness is all.’
What though are the chief criteria of the painter’s key compositions?-- an art that is integrative, as much as transparent of the inner spirit; an illuminant, if in an indescribable sense; abetting in the interrelatedness of our selves with the world that inexorably turns around us. Some times this order of art can take on in-explicit forms but which still are intensely affective since they reflect quintessential aspects of each and all of us; act as reminders of life’s deeper sources and goals. At other moments the works affect a balance between diverse or divisive elements; attain a proportionality and harmony that resonates throughout a viewer’s being. This in turn has the effect of communicating universal, that is, objective principles of cohesion such as give us the feel of certainty about the very nature of reality, and of our relationship to the surmised Whole-- datum of clean circles, flowing dots and lines.
Keshav Malik