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Renowned as a modernist sculptor, Dhanraj Bhagat received training in Western realism at the Mayo School of Art (now the National School of Art) in Lahore during the late 1930s. He was forced to relocate to Delhi as a refugee of the Partition of India and served as faculty at the Delhi Polytechnic between 1947 and 1977. In 1949, he also became a founding member of the Delhi Silpi Chakra, an artist collective that went on to shape... Renowned as a modernist sculptor, Dhanraj Bhagat received training in Western realism at the Mayo School of Art (now the National School of Art) in Lahore during the late 1930s. He was forced to relocate to Delhi as a refugee of the Partition of India and served as faculty at the Delhi Polytechnic between 1947 and 1977. In 1949, he also became a founding member of the Delhi Silpi Chakra, an artist collective that went on to shape post-Independence Indian art. Bhagat’s early practice, especially his paintings, focused on realist depictions of rural life and natural landscapes. However, he soon evolved a distinctive visual language, marked by the use of diverse materials and geometrical shapes. He began working with clay but, finding it limiting as a medium he shifted to wood.

Bhagat’s wooden sculptures reflect the social and emotional ruptures of pre- and post-Partition India. Although many of his early works in wood were lost during the Partition, critics in the 1930s and 1940s described them as smooth surfaced and highly polished. In contrast, his post-Partition sculptures took on a more rough-hewn quality, bearing visible chisel marks that echoed the political upheaval of the time. An encounter with architectural wood carvings in Rajasthan in 1936 influenced Bhagat’s sculptural approach. He began creating tall, vertical wooden forms, like the present lot, which challenged the conventions of human interior spaces and societal systems. As art critic Keshav Malik has remarked, “...Bhagat represents the trend of ‘restrained expression’, whether in his clay, wood or metals. He combines a striving for monumentality, shaped in his contacts with architects (or, rather, the architecture of a post-independent building India) and revealed in his monumental and seemingly inscrutable forms, all done with great beauty and great sensitivity to the beauty of sculpted surfaces.” (Keshav Malik, “Dhanraj Bhagat: Portrait of an Artist,” Lalit Kala Contemporary, Vol. 35, September 1987, accessed via Critical Collective, online)

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