Satish Gujral: The Modernist who refused to stay in one medium

Satish Gujral spent his career crossing boundaries that Indian modernism often treated as separate. Painting could become relief; relief could acquire volume; sculpture could begin to suggest a building. At the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai, The Modernist Returns: A Hundred Years of Restless Imagination brings these shifts together for a retrospective spanning more than 100 works, alongside photographs and personal archives. Curated by Pramod KG, the exhibition follows the movement of Gujral’s ideas rather than arranging his career into neatly divided categories.

Gujral himself offered a succinct description of this relationship: “I construct what I paint and paint what I sculpt.” For Pramod, the statement became an organising principle for the exhibition. He says, “Architecture needs plans, sites and time to be properly understood, and a few rooms in a gallery can’t do it justice,” he says. Instead, the exhibition uses works across mediums to make the larger argument: “for Gujral there was never a border between disciplines.”

The Satish Gujral retrospective display works influenced from his Mexico days, responses to the socio-political environment of his time, and focusses on architecture in new light

His engagement with the political and social realities around him continues to give the work urgency, particularly for younger audiences encountering it in a moment marked by protest, conflict and questions around freedom of expression.

As Kiran Gujral, his wife explains, “What feels most relevant today is Gujral’s response to his environment—political, social and economic.” The Partition paintings, she says, “record a moment in history, but they are also an act of defiance.” Rather than seeking beauty for its own sake, the works confront “the oppression and violence of their time.”

The centenary also places his Mexico years in a wider historical frame. Gujral’s engagement with major Mexican artists like Diego Rivera took place during a turbulent period in the country’s history, and the intensity of that encounter carried into his later work. The energy of his brushwork from the Mexico period can be traced into the Partition paintings, revealing how experiences across different geographies and histories informed his artistic language.

His architectural practice gives that restless movement physical scale. The Belgian Embassy in New Delhi demonstrates how concerns with mass, texture, light and shadow travelled from the studio into inhabited space.

For architect Mohit Gujral, this connection became clearest through working alongside his father. “The relationship between solid and void, light and shadow, texture and material mattered as much in a sculpture as it did in a building,” he says. A century after Gujral’s birth, the retrospective asks viewers to follow the ideas that travelled between painter, sculptor, and architect, rather than separating the painter from the sculptor or architect.

Until November 20, 2026

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