Rameshwar Broota (B. 1940)

Broota's art involves scraping away layers of monochromatic pigment with the sharp edge of a blade to create tone, shading and subtleties of texture. Instead of adding pigment to a canvas, his process became subtractive and is a play on the notion of the Gestalt--and the manipulation of positive and negative space in creating form. In A Chance Encounter, the soft musuclar flesh from the finely rendered leg is trapped into a cold hard metallic pipe. There is a latent homoeroticism in many of Broota's recent works. Here, as the flesh and the inanimate become one, the artist is perhaps commenting on the impotency of the human condition in an increasingly mechanized world.