Anil Rawat: When an Ancient Image Enters the Present

 Every image arrives carrying a history.

 

This is especially true of Hanuman. Long before Anil Rawat makes his first mark, the figure already exists in temple sculpture, calendar prints, popular imagery, household shrines and collective memory. The challenge for a contemporary artist is therefore not simply how to depict Hanuman, but how to make us see him again. Rawat’s achievement lies precisely here.

 

A gold medallist from Delhi College of Art, he brings to his practice decades of visual experience, including a distinguished and highly awarded career in advertising. His works have been exhibited at IGNCA, Ravindra Bhawan and India Habitat Centre, and are held in private collections in India, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States. His practice now spans digital, large-format giclée prints, drawings and sculpture.

 

Rawat’s images are striking because they disturb recognition. We know the figure before us, yet the conventional image has been unsettled. Bodies emerge through unexpected contours. Colour resists natural description. Faces may recede while posture remains. Familiar attributes survive, but illustration gives way to suggestion.

 

The result is neither traditional devotional painting nor digital spectacle. It is a fresh visual language positioned between memory and invention. This is particularly significant because Rawat works digitally. The mouse, a device associated with speed and utility, becomes an instrument for images concerned with something ancient and inward. A contemporary medium carries an inherited spiritual imagination.

 

Yet Rawat is not trying to recreate a sacred past. He asks what that inheritance might mean now. Devotion, courage, service, humility and selflessness become less the qualities of a distant deity than possibilities within ordinary human beings.

 

Curator and artist Samar Jodha captures this relationship between image and spectator: “These are not paintings of a god. They are paintings of what lives inside you.”

Artist:  Anil Rawat

That may be the clearest way into Rawat’s work. He does not modernise Hanuman by making the figure fashionable. He does something more difficult: he takes an image we believe we already understand and makes that certainty unstable.

 

We begin by looking at Hanuman. Eventually, Rawat turns the act of looking back upon us.