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拍品专文
After graduating from the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta, Sakti Burman moved to Paris in 1956 to attend Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts. His subsequent explorations of Europe and the art he saw on his travels across the continent greatly influenced the creation of his own unique artistic idiom. Burman’s paintings and textured surfaces are reminiscent of the frescoes of Giotto, Piero de la Francesca and Simone Martini, as well as the cave paintings at Ajanta. Burman developed his own unique painting technique that combined marbling and pointillism that he is so well-known for today, imbuing his compositions with these fresco-like surfaces.
The paintings Burman executes using this technique seem to occupy a world of their own, suspended between the spheres of myth and reality. He has often been called an “alchemist of dreams”, and through his canvases, the viewer unwittingly enters the realm of the fantastic. His works are a reflection of his own experiences blending Indian cultural sensibilities with an international aesthetic.
Painting his own frame around the edges of the surface in the present lot, Burman creates a sense of interiority for a scene that would normally play out in an exterior space. Rendered in light pastel hues, the subjects of this painting seem to occupy a dreamlike space. The eye of the viewer is immediately drawn to a lush, central tree, and then under the tree, to a reclining female figure and an elephant approaching her. What Burman is perhaps alluding to through these figures is the legend of the ‘dream of Maya’, part of the Buddha’s life story. Queen Maya, the mother of Buddha Shakyamuni, was said to have dreamt of a white elephant entering her womb when she conceived the Buddha. When depicted in classical sculpture, Queen Maya reclines on a bed with an elephant hovering above her. In this painting, Burman offers his own version of the story, with the large tree either representing fertility and the imminent birth of the Buddha, or the Bodhi tree under which he attained enlightenment.
“Sakti Burman’s spirit is one in which poetical and interior meditation, harmonies of sounds and his dreams and reflections mingle together and form an image full of color, fantasy, designs, variety, fragments of stories and at the same time, an invitation to silent, discreet and joyous contemplation of the realities” (I Pel. Luc Calvero, Sakti Burman, Fumel, 1984).
The paintings Burman executes using this technique seem to occupy a world of their own, suspended between the spheres of myth and reality. He has often been called an “alchemist of dreams”, and through his canvases, the viewer unwittingly enters the realm of the fantastic. His works are a reflection of his own experiences blending Indian cultural sensibilities with an international aesthetic.
Painting his own frame around the edges of the surface in the present lot, Burman creates a sense of interiority for a scene that would normally play out in an exterior space. Rendered in light pastel hues, the subjects of this painting seem to occupy a dreamlike space. The eye of the viewer is immediately drawn to a lush, central tree, and then under the tree, to a reclining female figure and an elephant approaching her. What Burman is perhaps alluding to through these figures is the legend of the ‘dream of Maya’, part of the Buddha’s life story. Queen Maya, the mother of Buddha Shakyamuni, was said to have dreamt of a white elephant entering her womb when she conceived the Buddha. When depicted in classical sculpture, Queen Maya reclines on a bed with an elephant hovering above her. In this painting, Burman offers his own version of the story, with the large tree either representing fertility and the imminent birth of the Buddha, or the Bodhi tree under which he attained enlightenment.
“Sakti Burman’s spirit is one in which poetical and interior meditation, harmonies of sounds and his dreams and reflections mingle together and form an image full of color, fantasy, designs, variety, fragments of stories and at the same time, an invitation to silent, discreet and joyous contemplation of the realities” (I Pel. Luc Calvero, Sakti Burman, Fumel, 1984).