Satish Gujaral: Biography

Satish Gujral is one of the greatest as well as the most versatile artists of the Indian subcontinent. He is a painter who sculpts and builds some of the most exquisite paintings, graphics, murals and sculptures, apart from indulging in architecture and interior designing. Recently Satish Gujral has also donned the role of an author by publishing his engrossing autobiography   “A brush with life”.
Satish Gujral was born at Jhelum in 1925. At the tender age of eight, an illness fatally impaired his hearing. He attended the Mayo School of Arts at Lahore for five years,
In 1944, he moved to Mumbai and took admission in the Sir J.J. School of Art. In 1947, a recurring sickness forced him to drop out of J.J. School of Art. Unlike his contemporaries who spent their formative years in Europe, Satish Gujral worked in Mexico, on a Mexican Government Scholarship in 1952, for an apprenticeship with Diego Rivera and David Sequeiros. There, his work got heavily influenced by the suffering of the people because of the partition of the country.

His First solo show was held in Mexico City in 1953.

Returning from Mexico, he spent some years in New York and London imbibing and absorbing the trends and ideologies then prevalent there.
He returned to India after two successful exhibitions there and began to redefine his style, incorporating the three modes of painting, sculpture and architecture.

Brooding and elemental, his aesthetic world rises from a complex matrix that assimilates both the ancient and the modern. In his bid to stretch the boundaries of art, Gujral has never flinched from experimenting with a wide variety of mediums - ceramics, wood, metal, stone...before returning to his paint brushes.
The Belgian Embassy, in New Delhi, is an architecture marvel that has earned him the ‘Order of the Crown’ by the King of Belgium. It has been listed by the International Forum of Architects as one of the 1,000 best buildings built in the 20th century.
He has received...