Rajendra Dhawan was born in New Delhi, India, in 1936. As a young man, he studied at the polytechnic school of his native city (renamed College of Art) from 1953 to 1958, then in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, from 1964 to 1966. In New Delhi, he became a founding member of the group "The Unknown", which was active from 1960 to 1964. The group exhibited in India, but also in Europe (Luxembourg, Germany, Norway, Yugoslavia and France).After his return from Belgrade, Rajendra Dhawan...

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  Biography of Rajendra Dhawan

  Rajendra Dhawan was born in New Delhi, India, in 1936. As a young man, he studied at the polytechnic school of his native city (renamed College of Art) from 1953 to 1958, then in Belgrade, in the former Yugoslavia, from 1964 to 1966. In New Delhi, he became a founding member of the group "The Unknown", which was active from 1960 to 1964. The group exhibited in India, but also in Europe (Luxembourg, Germany, Norway, Yugoslavia and France).
  After his return from Belgrade, Rajendra Dhawan participated in numerous exhibitions in India and abroad; at the same time, he taught art in a college inn Phagwara, Punjab. In 1970, he decided to leave for Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts; he finally settled permanently in the French capital. However, he did not cut his ties with his country of origin and made several trips to New Delhi for exhibitions dedicated to him. In Paris, Dhawan, who lives in seclusion, is described by his peers as a "very important painter" and his work is compared to that of V. S. Gaitonde and J. Swaminathan.Two other leading Indian abstract painters were Rajendra Dhawan's contemporaries in Paris - S. H. Raza and V. Viswanadhan - but unlike them, the artist did not claim an indigenous abstraction, simply letting his art be personal and autonomous.The metaphysical nature of Dhawan's work remained constant throughout his career. In 2011, a year before his death, Dhawan remarked in an exhibition catalogue that he had been working all his life: « My works have evolved as I have with time. I paint today as I did years ago, but when I sometimes look back, I see that change. It was a subtle, slow change ».In Rajendra Dhawan's work, the colours merge, never in opposition to each other but in a kind of quiet conversation. His style is based on a subtlety drawn from the minimal; unlike Western minimalism, his is based on a subdued emotional tone. Expansive expanses of seemingly indistinct and restricted pigment coexist with rough, abbreviated linear strokes.His work is represented in several collections in India and France, including the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, Bharat Bhavan Museum and the National Foundation of Contemporary Art, Paris. Rajendra Dhawan passed away in 2012.

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