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"Art, for me, was always about trying to express some kind of reality mixed with what is unreal, a dreamlike sequence. The events you see are a result of juxtapositions within my subconscious, my cultural fabric, and my reality." - SAKTI BURMAN

Sakti Burman's surrealist, vibrant paintings draw from a wide variety of sources, including the artist's own dreams and memories, the French Impressionists, as well as the poetry of... "Art, for me, was always about trying to express some kind of reality mixed with what is unreal, a dreamlike sequence. The events you see are a result of juxtapositions within my subconscious, my cultural fabric, and my reality." - SAKTI BURMAN

Sakti Burman's surrealist, vibrant paintings draw from a wide variety of sources, including the artist's own dreams and memories, the French Impressionists, as well as the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore and Charles Baudelaire. Burman travelled to Italy in 1958, and his encounter with the frescoes of Giotto, Piero de la Francesca and Simone Martini inspired him to assimilate their monumentality and textures in his works. His defining oeuvre owes largely to his technique of marbling, seen in the present lot, which he arrived at after years of experimentation. Here, he places a dominant female figure, possibly drawing from 16th century European artistic traditions, into frames that imply structure. "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." (Manasij Majumder, Sakti Burman: Dreamer on the Ark, Bombay: Pundole Art Gallery, 2001, pp. 128-129)

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