Images of assertion

Vasundhara Tewari Broota's oeuvre represents her own autonomous sexuality, but leaves it open to interpretations.

Few know that Vasundhara Tewari Broota would have been a lawyer had she not left it all for art.

"I completed one year of law college before I decided that I only wanted to be a full-time artist. My friends called me mad, but the decision was made,'' says Tewari, who is exhibiting her latest solo "Woman Speak/Child Song" at the Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi.

The show is on at the gallery till January 20 and then it moves to Shridharani Gallery, Triveni Kala Sangam between January 24 and February 2, 2007.

Little wonder she has a lot of lawyers as friends. Tewari has been exhibiting since the seventies. It was, however, only in 1980 that she had her first solo exhibition. "Those were the days when you painted for pleasure and art was not exactly a lucrative profession. But things have changed since..." she trails off.

So, Tewari graduated from Delhi University with literature as her subject and went on to study at Triveni Kala Sangam. During 1982-84, she worked on a cultural scholarship awarded by the department of culture of the government of India.

She held seven solo shows in New Delhi, Chicago, Calcutta and Bombay between 1980 and 1994, and participated in 24 important national and international exhibitions. Her works find place in several national and international public and private collections.

Tewari is one of the few artists who likes to explore the potential of figurative painting, particularly the psycho-political existence of the female body. What makes her work stand out is the inherent feminism that translates into women empowerment.

In her latest oeuvre, the image of the child dominates the canvas. Though in a playful fashion, the works charter the journey of a woman from childhood. Each of her characters are empowered not from the point of view of a victim but from the perspective of assertion.

If it is youth that she seeks to project, her ground too is brighter this time round "" more colourful than her previous works. "It's an evocative ground that evokes free lines "" one that represents freedom,'' she says.

But while it is freedom that she seeks to express, she finds it hard to ignore the political scenario. Be it the diminishing numbers that find representation in most of her canvases or the parallels she seeks to draw through images of endangered species like vulture and oryx, the message is loud and clear.

Says Gayatri Sinha, a noted art critic in her catalogue text: "Tewari's paintings tease and tug at the question of the child, as the first sign on the continuum of the female presence. Tewari ignores the birthing metaphors or the profusions of cultural reading attached to the mother nestling the child in close proximity, from both the Christian and the Hindu traditions. The child of her evocation is a poem, a movement in time that embodies even in its unknowing state the nuances of living transition... Her [the child's] solitary state and the absence of the mother/guide not only offers a comment on the state of childhood, but anticipates the isolation of the female condition."

Incidentally, Tewari first drew attention for her sensitive mixed media work in which she interpreted the female nude not as an object of desire or artistic muse but as an empowered agent in relentless search of her independent individuality.

Her treatment and use of the female nude soon became emblematic of the inner life of contemporary women.

Her paintings are characterised by tensions arising out of the naturalistically modelled figures and the flat pictorial space, which is enriched with small focuses of tonal recessions.