Important Notice

“The constructions of my paintings are based more on curves than on straight lines.” - SAKTI BURMAN

Taking inspiration from his own dreams and memories, the French impressionists, as well as the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Baudelaire, Sakti Burman’s paintings create a romantic world of grace and harmony. “Distinguished by soothing colours, graceful contours, and rich textures, the works combine European artistic... “The constructions of my paintings are based more on curves than on straight lines.” - SAKTI BURMAN

Taking inspiration from his own dreams and memories, the French impressionists, as well as the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Baudelaire, Sakti Burman’s paintings create a romantic world of grace and harmony. “Distinguished by soothing colours, graceful contours, and rich textures, the works combine European artistic traditions with themes from Indian mythology.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, 2005, p. 24)

Though each motif employed by Burman on his figurative canvases may appear individually familiar, the realities that they come together to create are anything but recognisable. Frequently referred to as an ‘alchemist of dreams’, the images on Burman’s complex, otherworldly canvases are condensed through both experience and fantasy. “Each of Sakti’s canvases looks as finished as a meticulous filigree work. He creates a chequered chromatic surface of visual splendour by means of a dense network of varied tones and textures charged in every detail with strong but disciplined aesthetic stimulation.” (Manasij Majumder, Sakti Burman: Dreamer on the Ark, Mumbai: Pundole Art Gallery, 2001, p. 10)

His defining oeuvre owes largely to his technique of marbling, as seen in the present lot – a technique that is the result of an elaborate and meticulous process. Here, he presents his version of a group of acrobats caught in the middle of their act. “The impact is not much unlike a surrealist inwardness ensured by a mechanism of aesthetic ordering of a topsy-turvy pictorial world... there are often clearly marked areas of smooth and textured passages of paint, played off one against the other, as a chequered colour groundwork for the image to convey a pure imaginative experience of strong-visual sensation.” (Majumder, pp. 128-129)

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