Marking one hundred years since the birth of visionary artist Shri Satish Gujral, Raseel Gujral Art Legacy has unveiled an exclusive showcase of rare, limited-edition collectibles honouring his extraordinary creative journey. Open to the public from 4–9 August 2026, 11 AM–7 PM daily, at The Main Art Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi, the exhibition brings together art lovers, collectors, and admirers to celebrate the life and work of one of modern India’s most singular creative forces.
The celebrations began with the unveiling of a commemorative postage stamp, released by the Department of Posts in collaboration with Raseel Gujral Art Legacy. The stamp was unveiled by Union Communications Minister Shri Jyotiraditya Scindia at a ceremony held at Bikaner House, bringing together family, collectors, artists, and members of the press to honour an artist whose seven-decade career helped shape India’s modern artistic and architectural identity.
Calling Gujral a singular creative force, Scindia spoke of the artist’s remarkable ability to move fluidly across disciplines—from painting and sculpture to architecture—a versatility that set him apart from his contemporaries. He also reflected on how Gujral transformed the profound hearing impairment he suffered as a child into a defining strength of his practice, noting that what appeared to be a limitation became the very foundation of his extraordinary artistic language, built on colour, texture, form, and space.
The image chosen for the stamp holds special significance. It reproduces a 2010 acrylic-on-canvas self-portrait showing Gujral seated with a paintbrush—one of only four self-portraits he is believed to have created in his entire career. The work is rendered in a striking manner: the artist’s face is depicted in photorealistic black-and-white, set against a fully coloured composition, lending the portrait an intimate, cinematic quality.
The original painting, held in the private collection of Raseel Gujral Ansal, was gifted by Satish and Kiran Gujral to Navin Ansal and Raseel Gujral Ansal, and has remained a treasured family possession ever since. It is now on public display alongside the exhibition’s limited-edition Satish Gujral Centenary Stamp Collectibles, hosted by Navin Ansal and Raseel Gujral Ansal.
Born on 25 December 1925 in Jhelum, undivided Punjab (now in Pakistan), Gujral experienced a serious childhood accident that resulted in a prolonged loss of hearing. Drawing became his primary means of communication and self-expression during those formative years. He went on to study at the Mayo School of Art, Lahore, and later at the Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, though illness prevented him from completing his training there.
The violence and displacement of the 1947 Partition left a lasting imprint on his early work, which explored grief, migration, and the psychological weight of historical trauma through burdened bodies and emotionally charged figures. In 1952, a scholarship took him to the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where he worked alongside muralists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, an experience that expanded his understanding of scale, public art, and the relationship between form and social history.
Over more than seven decades, Gujral resisted classification within any single style or medium. His early figurative paintings carried emotional intensity, while his later work embraced abstraction, geometry, and material experimentation across oil, acrylic, burnt wood, metal, ceramic, and stone. His sculptural practice balanced mass and movement, simplifying human and animal forms into rhythmic structures that carried memory and emotion.
Architecture formed another major pillar of his practice. His design for the Embassy of Belgium in New Delhi is widely regarded as his architectural masterpiece, conceived through brick, vaults, terraces, and shadow, reflecting a sculptor’s understanding of space. His buildings, like his murals and sculptures, treat walls as relief surfaces and mass as an expressive, emotional element.
Gujral exhibited extensively across India and internationally, including in Mumbai, New York, Montreal, Berlin, and Tokyo. A major retrospective, Satish Gujral: A Retrospective 1948–2006, was held at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. He also maintained a long association with Aakriti Art Gallery, Kolkata, which presented several major exhibitions of his work, including Time’s Whirlwind (2009), Eyes on Life (2011), and The World of Satish Gujral (2015), marking his ninetieth birth anniversary.
Gujral received numerous national and international honours, including the Padma Vibhushan in 1999, India’s second-highest civilian award, along with recognition from the Lalit Kala Akademi and the Da Vinci Award for lifetime achievement from Mexico. He passed away in New Delhi on 26 March 2020.
His legacy lies in the remarkable unity he achieved across disciplines: painting, sculpture, mural, and architecture were never separate pursuits for Gujral, but interconnected expressions of a single, ongoing enquiry into form, history, space, and human experience. As this centenary exhibition demonstrates, Satish Gujral’s refusal to be confined to one medium continues to make him a defining and irreplaceable voice in the story of modern Indian art.
