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.
Broota was born in Delhi in 1943, and the city lives in her art. “I never left Delhi. Even as I travelled across the world, Delhi is where my heart and my art were,” she smiles. Though it was music that claimed her first. As a five-year-old, she started her training in Indian classical music. Years of riyaaz taught her patience, discipline, surrender—qualities she would carry into everything she touched. At 19, she earned a Sangeet Visharad in Hindustani classical vocals. But two years later, her path quietly shifted. She enrolled at the College of Art in Delhi, and suddenly, the space between sound and sight began to blur.
Her early students at Triveni Kala Sangam remember her walking among them, humming under her breath as she looked at their drawings. “Draw like you’re breathing,” she would say. “Let the line resolve like a note.” One former student recalls a day she paused by his canvas and softly began to sing raag Yaman, showing how the curve of a brushstroke could carry the grace of a meend.
Back then, her own work was still figurative—largely portraits and woodcuts. But by the 1990s, the figure had all but disappeared. Her canvases became spacious, abstract, luminous. Standing before them felt less like looking and more like listening. A critic once described them as “whispers of infinity”—a phrase that still lingers in reviews and recollections.
And then came the threads. Wool, silk, yarn—stitched directly into canvas, not as ornament but as voice. “My work has constantly evolved. After all, what is the point of doing the same thing again and again? You need to wander in search of new notes,” she says. In her Sutra series, the act of weaving became a continuation of the alaap. One loop, one knot, one breath at a time. A critic later wrote, “These are paintings one can almost listen to.”
Painting Infinity brings all of this together: the earthy sketches, the shimmering colour fields, the soft echo of woolen threads. Structured across five sections—Seed of Origin, Earth & Sky, Woven Echoes, Impressions in Ink, and Portraits in Time—the retrospective offers not just a chronology, but a deeper connection with her art. It moves from her earliest portraits, to her metaphysical explorations of light, silence, and space. In her semi-abstract works, one sees the glint of rain on leaves, the play of wind on water, the quiet pattern of bird wings in flight. In one canvas, a single dot sits surrounded by soft flicks of paint. “I flick until the surface begins to breathe,” she says. This technique—painterly yet weightless—is hers alone. It comes not from a desire to impress, but from decades of listening inward.
Broota recalls a moment with fellow artist Rajendra Tiku. He looked at her work and said, “There is no figure here, yet it feels alive—like presence without form.” It was, for her, a moment of clarity. “I only paint what I hear when I am silent.” And that may be the truest way to enter her world. To stand before her work is to let go of expectation. There is no story, no climax, no resolution. There is only unfolding. The longer one looks, the more the painting stops being a painting. It becomes sound—a sound of stillness.