Art Musings presents a rare treat for art lovers in the city of Mumbai, with their exhibition ‘Transfigurations’, featuring bas relief sculptures in brass by eminent Indian master Sakti Burman.
Sakti Burman is a pilgrim of complex allegiances. Born in Kolkata in 1935, Burman moved to France in 1959, where he studied, lived and worked until 2019, participating fully in French cultural life; and yet, he emphatically retained his association with India through long-term friendships, continuing professional collaborations, and frequent visits. At the core of his practice is the confluence among cultures, mythologies, periods, and places. Various Indian and European pasts inhabit his art, drawing from mythology, the Mughal miniature ateliers, from Kalighat as well as West European art history and Bengali popular culture.
To quote from the catalogue essay, authored by cultural theorist and art historian Ranjit Hoskote, “Sakti Burman’s recent suite of bas relief sculptures, based on images that have preoccupied him over the decades, reminds us of the tableaux of classical sculpture as featured on the grand doors and elevations of churches, the friezes of public buildings and the exteriors of temple complexes. In a medium that is new to the artist, Burman brings us, again, into the presence of the figures and situations that have fascinated him. Translated or rather transfigured from one medium to another, Sakti Burman’s images breathe a new air, seek our attention afresh. Importantly, these sculptures take the precise form of the fragment, the detail from a larger or lost whole that speaks allusively of that whole. Burman’s sculptural fragments, although complete in themselves, speak to us of the far longer choreography that is his life, his visceral connection to two civilisations and continents, his singular and courageous devotion to the artist’s vocation, which survives all challenges and cataclysms