Important Notice

B Prabha began her career as an artist at a time when opportunities and success were scarcely available to women - both in the art world and beyond. Her depictions of the plight and lives of rural Indian women are not only some of the most celebrated and instantly recognised, but also among the earliest by women artists in modern India. Prabha was born in the village of Bela, near Nagpur in Maharashtra in 1933. She studied at the Nagpur School... B Prabha began her career as an artist at a time when opportunities and success were scarcely available to women - both in the art world and beyond. Her depictions of the plight and lives of rural Indian women are not only some of the most celebrated and instantly recognised, but also among the earliest by women artists in modern India. Prabha was born in the village of Bela, near Nagpur in Maharashtra in 1933. She studied at the Nagpur School of Art after which she went on to pursue a Diploma in Painting and Mural Painting from the prestigious Sir J J School of Art in Mumbai.

During the early years of her career, Prabha experimented with a variety of genres and mediums before settling into a style and subject that remained her trademark throughout her career: a strikingly graceful portrayal of rural Indian women, slightly elongated in form, engaging in everyday tasks, as seen in the present lot as well as lot 27. "Featured singly or in groups of two or three, [these women] were seen either against flat, undistinguished backgrounds or in their surroundings, the artist chronicling the lives of women from different rural and tribal communities with attentive details of their skin colour, traditional attire and jewellery but keener still to projecting an individual's inner being or the dynamics between women. The seeming simplicity of the compositions belied the concern for women's welfare and the need to document their unsung lives that drove the artist, herself practicing at a time when women had few opportunities." (Kishore Singh ed., "B. Prabha: In A Wasted Landscape," Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art II, New Delhi: DAG, 2017, p. 361)

Art writer Kishore Singh observes, "All of B. Prabha's works are marked by a formal elegance of both compositional arrangement as well as palette and brushwork, achieving its height in her work featuring these women but, the same aesthetic and painterly approach is visible in her other works too" (Singh ed., p. 361). Painted with a carefully modulated palette, Prabha's work speaks volumes about the interiority of women's lives. Beyond simple documentation, these works are odes to the spirit and struggles of women.

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