SAKTI BURMAN RETROSPECTIVE

Sakti Burman, one of the most prominent contemporary Indian artists, is known for paintings inspired by Indian and European mythology. He uses the techniques of pointillism and marbling, and it’s difficult to distinguish the real from the surreal in his works. Poet and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote aspires to show all this through In the Presence of Another Sky: Sakti Burman, a Retrospective, which chronicles 70 years of Burman’s tempestuous life and displays 250 of his works. Presented by the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, in association with Art Musings (a city art gallery), the exhibition runs through November 26 at NGMA. Born in 1935 in Vidyakut (now in Bangladesh), Burman spent his formative years in Dibrugarh, later moving to France where he resides today. His works bear testimony to his memories and extensive travels and feature humans, animals and cityscapes in dream-like sequences. “Sakti straddles cultures in civilisation and time,” says Hoskote. “His works are trans-historical. The retrospective is to honour that kind of trans-cultural imagination. It’s the need of the hour when everybody’s imagination is getting narrow and hard-edged. We need to celebrate an artist who is inspired as much by the Ajantas as by Pompeii, Kali Ghat and the architecture of Paris.”

The retrospective features two of Burman’s works from 1950, when he was a student, his most recent paintings of this year as well as drawings, lithographs, textile designs, sketchbooks and illustrations. “My point was to bear witness to the plenitude of his artistic production,” says Hoskote. The show also features Burman’s six-month work for a Paris design studio in the early ’60s and his lithographic illustrations for a limited edition of the French translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali.

Hoskote and Burman have known each other for 27 years and collaborated on a book that juxtaposed the curator’s poems with the artist’s images. “Sakti spent his first decade in the shadow of World War II and Partition. When he moved to Europe, the continent had barely recovered from the war. It was against these upheavals that he came to the notions of beauty and the sublime. When you are tracing through 70 years of an artist’s life, you are coursing through how these different facets influence his being,” says Hoskote.

THE EXHIBITION CHRONICLES 70 YEARS OF SAKTI BURMAN’S TEMPESTUOUS LIFE AND HAS 250 WORKS ON DISPLAY