Lot 55: Re-take of Amrita Re-take of Amrita Sher Gil - Still Life of Amrita

VIVAN SUNDARAM (B. 1943)
Re-take of Amrita Re-take of Amrita Sher Gil - Still Life of Amrita
signed 'Vivan 2001' (lower right)
photomontage
15 x 23in. (38 x 58.4cm.)
Executed in 2001

Amrita Sher - Gil is recognized as the first truly Modern Indian artist, born in Hungary of mixed Indo - Hungarian parentage in 1913. Undoubtedly this heritage gave her many of the opportunities that molded her. She was an individualist in the true sense, not belonging to any one school of painting. She was trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and from there on her style emerged as pictorial and a fusion of Western and Eastern tradition. Her education in the West exposed her to modern masters such as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh. She returned to India because she felt that India was hers, whereas the West already belonged to Matisse, Picasso, and Braque etc. Sher-Gil's legacy to Indian art was to bring it out of its lethargy and to liberate it from it's ode to British academicism and imitation of the Bengal School.
In 2000 Vivan Sunderam, Sher - Gil's nephew and renowned multi-media artist produced the Re-take of Amrita Sher - Gil series (he is her sister's son) using the legacy of photographic archive left behind by her father, his grandfather, Umrao Singh Sher - Gil. From the countless photographs of the entire Sher - Gil family that are in the archive and especially of Amrita, Sunderam has reworked the images and created photomontages, each retake telling a new and different story, with the common thread being Amrita herself, in the center, in the foreground. There is a sense of poignancy that radiates from each of these photomontages, of a bygone era. The viewer is confronted all at once with multiple emotions in relation to the central subject herself, the choice of media and expression by the artist, as well as the relationship between the original photographer, the subject and Vivan Sunderam, the artist himself.