Untitled

Despite its quietness, perhaps because of it, Rajendra Dhawan’s work has remained exceptional through his career. He arrived at a unique, individuated language of abstraction in the early 1960s—this knack for the abstract received impetus when the artist studied in then Yugoslavia and then in Paris, where he soon decided to settle. The socio-political circumstances of Europe in the 60s and 70s encouraged a non-representational idiom to represent the struggles of modern life. For Dhawan, what he ‘saw, felt and met in Paris’ corresponded with his work and helped him ‘continue that which I had already started on choice.’