The Sound of Stillness

Painting Infinity brings all of Shobha Broota’s works together: the earthy sketches, the shimmering colour fields, and the soft echo of threads

- By MEDHA DUTTA YADAV

In the stillness of early morning, before the world stirs, Shobha Broota begins her day not with pigment, but with a raag. “Music is my constant companion. You will always find me humming, or listening to something. It gives me a certain calm. And it is this calm that I translate onto the canvas,” says the 82-year-old artist.

To walk into Painting Infinity, her first-ever retrospective at DAG, New Delhi, is to enter this world. A world where sound becomes form, and form becomes vibration. Where a single canvas glows like a low, resonant note, held just long enough to feel its weight. Featuring nearly 100 works across six decades—portraits, etchings, woven canvases, ink impressions—this exhibition is centred on the bindu—the dot. “The beginning and the end,” as the artist calls it. It is similar to how artist SH Raza imagined the dot. Like in Raza’s works, where it symbolised the origin of the universe, in Broota’s hands, too, a whole cosmos unfurls around the bindu: loops of wool stitched into silence, and gentle flicks of paint, each one calm and quiet.