The Delhi-born painter has spent years honing his craft from his early days of satirical pungent humour, pictured in his Gorilla Series (1970 to 1979) to his almost meditative nudes that were the work of a tiny blade scratching paint to reveal the form. His latest tryst is with a new medium, photography; a suite is on display at the Sakshi Art Gallery with the backing of Vadhera Art Gallery.

“Photography is a combination of fact and fiction,” says Broota whose images are digitally manipulated to exceed their ‘naturalness’. Like a male body affixed with a skirt on its lower half or a kettle with two spouts blocked by two fingers that appears to bulge and burst. “Photography was something I was moving towards; it just took the right stimulus to spark it off,” says the three-time Lalit Kala Akademi winner.

Having experimented with abstraction, printmaking techniques and video art, photography was just another step in his oeuvre as an artist. However, writer-critic Shukla Sawant says Broota’s works challenge the very notion of objectivity that is often ascribed to photography. “It is the little shifts and displacements in Broota’s work that draw his photographs into the realm of imaginings.” The photographs in question are close-ups of objects in a museum, digitally manipulated and an interesting interplay between the past and in the present. Objects in a museum usually connote a sense of historicity while digital technology is located within the age of globalisation.

Broota also poses nude in front of the lens, coyly concealing his crotch, echoing the pose struck by the marble image of a Greek kuros. Inverting the roles ascribed to men and women, Broota is one of the few male artists who questions his position as male and the roles men are supposed to play. “Men are often thrust into roles they may despise,” says Broota, who adds that men are often obliged to enact roles of violence even if they have no innate proclivity towards it.

“Photographs of male nudes, along the horizontal axis, project the male body very poignantly. Some almost suggestive of male pudica brought out pure poetics in black and white. It cast a different light on the idea of masculinity which could be re-imagined as vulnerable and beautiful, something which the focus on body hair could not detract from,” says Parul Dave Mukherji, dean of JNU Delhi, who has been following Broota’s works. “Usually, fragmentation of body parts is associated with commoditisation of the female body but surprisingly, a different dynamics is at work when the camera closes upon a male body part.”