Rajendra Dhawan

“I bring into my painting my experience...”

Rajendra Dhawan’s (1936- 2012) artistic style was a diverse bandwidth of subtlety, abstraction and reinvention. His focus on rendering minimalist pitch brings an understated lightness with seamlessly conjured linear strokes. He termed his evolution as a subtle and slow change that gingerly shifted during his lifetime. 

Dhawan pursued his education at Delhi School of Art and then in Belgrade, Yugoslavia till 1962. A prominent abstractionist at his time, Dhawan was also the founding father of a group known as The Unknown, which held exhibitions in 1964. Almost with meditative exactitude, his paintings flow and converge like they are predetermined. The colours never overpower the other but harmoniously contrast like a pristine iridescence. 

Unlike other abstractionists, Dhawan chooses to delegate his works by focusing on specific areas on the canvas and forgoing the rest to remain blank. With a wide spectrum of blurred compositions that dissolve organically, the paintings express an ethereal outlook for the perceiver. The constant ripple of imagination that he indicates in his paintings is unparalleled and unique. He chose to remain unruffled when he was compared to other prominent abstractionists, at that time, like J. Swaminathan and V.S. Gaitonde.  

In 1970, Dhawan left India and moved to Paris to continue his training at Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Throughout his career as an abstract artist, Dhawan’s practice remained perpetual like the setting and rising of the sun. In one of his exhibition catalogues, he expresses his views on how his paintings have gone through very slow change since his conception into the field. 

Dhawan’s paintings are housed in the Foundation of Contemporary Art, Paris, the Glenbarra Museum, Japan, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Terr us Museum in Elne, France, to name a few.