Amrita Sher-Gil
"Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and many others; India only belongs to me" said Amrita Sher-Gil in 1938, proclaiming in an audacious and bold manner her ambition to become the first modern painter of India. She was twenty-five, and she had just finished her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris - she was admitted at only 16.
In 1934, at the age of 21, she decided to come back to her native country, then engaging in a great journey to discover ancient Indian art. It was a sort of aesthetic epiphany that radically reoriented her art. For the next seven years, she combined her European heritage with the one she received in India. This lecture will focus on this iconic figure of Indian modern art at a key moment of her history.
Deepak Ananth is an art historian and critic, and a curator. Trained at St Xavier’s College of the University of Bombay and at the Courtauld Institute. He teaches art history at the École Supérieure d’Arts et Médias in Caen (France). As a specialist of modern and contemporary Indian art, he has contributed to many book and exhibition projects, among which: Seuils (first exhibition of French contemporary art in India, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, 1996); « Indian Summer : La jeune scène artistique indienne », Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris, 2005; « La Musique des Couleurs: Dessins de Roland Barthes » (Universités de Tokyo et de Kyoto, 2006-07), « Orientations » (Foundation 11 Lijnen, Oudenburg, Belgium, 2010), « Indomania. L’Inde dans l’imaginaire de l’Occident » (Bozart, Brussels, 2013). He is currently preparing a book on contemporary Indian art, published by Reaktion Books.