Art of Neeraj Goswami reflects the state of the art in India as it grew over the last fifty years. Born in Patna, in 1964, he grew up in Delhi
since the age of eight and was groomed to be an artist since then even though his family had little means to support such an ambition.
He was honoured with a solo show in his school days in Delhi and won considerable attention from veterans like Saradindu Sen Roy and Gulam
Rasool Santosh before entering Art College in Delhi. His next solo took place while still in art college and it was veteran artists from Delhi
Silpi Chakra, K S Kulkarni and Anupam Sud and others, who came forward to organize it with a view to recognize his prolific talent. There was no
going back for him since then. Between 1990 to 2000 he had had ten solos held almost annually in Delhi and, predictably enough, catapulted him in
the prime frontier of the mainstream Indian Art of the day.
There was, and still is, a big difference in his art that compels serious attention from contemporaries as well as from connoisseurs in equal measure.
Instead of looking outward for inspiration he trained his mind to look inward for subjects. He inherited his strength of spiritual inquest from his
grandfather and received intense spiritual training from his ‘Guru’ while still in his teens and thus developed a spiritual individuality that got
reflected in his art with increasing clarity. In fact a retrospective of his art over the last twenty five years will easily reveal how his mind got
increasingly cleansed from the accumulated garbage of the societal surroundings and it was mainly achieved with regular and intense ‘kriyas’ taught to him.
His art got simultaneously strengthened in degrees in which surrealism and minimalism got artistically reinvented. Even Cubism became an artistically
descriptive tool in his hand and its complicated surface divisionism attained its simplified minimalism, gradually yet steadily, over the same period
in his art.
In spite of the gradual, post-modernistic, recent trend to do away with traditional art-making techniques Neeraj Goswami remains faithful to canvas
and paint without loosing his cutting-edge strength of spiritual surrealism that has an unmistakably modern appeal seldom seen in contemporary art. He
believes painted canvas, with its age-old practice of framed rectangularity, has a time-less appeal of eternity while all other contemporary practice for
installation and videography has a temporal air that is almost transitional in character. He however is very fond of sculpture in the round and has already
tried his hand in this medium with unmistakable originality .He is now in the process of planning his future projects with large sculptures in public
spaces.
Neeraj has shown his works almost in all parts of the world and has retained his childhood habit of receiving critical accolade since, at the age of five,
his drawing of an elephant on a large black-board in primary school received headline-space in a Patna Daily. He, aged forty eight, now lives and works in
New Delhi.
