Important Notice

Sakti Burman’s visual language took shape between post‒ Independence India and post‒war Europe. He remained committed to the human figure. “The impulse to continue painting figures, to focus on humans… their myths and legends, proved too strong.” (Sakti Burman quoted in Kishore Singh, “All Aboard the Ark of Sakti Burman’s Dreamworld,” 2012, p. 62) “His themes, products of his sensibility and imagination, coupled with his mastery of technique,... Sakti Burman’s visual language took shape between post‒ Independence India and post‒war Europe. He remained committed to the human figure. “The impulse to continue painting figures, to focus on humans… their myths and legends, proved too strong.” (Sakti Burman quoted in Kishore Singh, “All Aboard the Ark of Sakti Burman’s Dreamworld,” 2012, p. 62) “His themes, products of his sensibility and imagination, coupled with his mastery of technique, glorify womanhood, faces and their reflection—the mirror, birds, shells—a fiesta of senses, nothing can be more poetical.” (Michael Bohbot, “Alchemist of Dreams”, Sakti Burman, Paris, 1984)

Burman was captivated by Botticelli’s Three Graces and continued to revisit the figure of a woman gazing into a mirror. The present lot brings that relationship into a more mysterious register: the woman turns away from the mirror, while a fantastical creature looks back at her from within its reflection. Burman’s mirror “does not reflect the picture’s fecund fantasy, but rather opens up a yet more magical and stranger world than outside its frame.” (Manasij Majumder, Sakti Burman Dreamer on the Ark, Mumbai, 2001, p. 131)

By the 1970s, Burman had developed his signature marbled, fresco‒like surface visible in the present lot. He achieved a “fresco feeling — faded and old, as if it were already there.” (Sakti Burman, “Art Talk: Sakti Burman,” NewsX Live, YouTube) A chance encounter between water and pigment produced the “marvellous iridescent texture.” (Artist quoted in Singh, p. 50)

Sunil Gangopadhyay located Burman’s freedom from logic in the realm of dreams, where “Dreams unhinge the rational order of our conscious life.” (Sunil Gangopadhyay in Singh, p. 53) Burman understood the cosmos as “pageant or dance: a theatre of appearances, kaleidoscopic in their combination of mutability and intensity.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Sakti Burman: At Home in the World,” Economic & Political Weekly, 2017) The present lot enacts this theatre: the nude woman, the fantastical creature within the mirror and the floating figure occupy a space in which reflection, fantasy and reality merge.

“If you don’t dream, you are nothing. Do you need me
to say more?” - SAKTI BURMAN

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