Maya Burman, Festival of Anthe, Watercolour, Ink and Pencil Colour on Paper, 107cm x 149cm, 2022
About The Show
Art Alive Gallery’s inaugural show at The Quorum Mumbai titled Games of Life, will be exhibiting recent works of Maya Burman. Maya Burman’s watercolors and ink paintings in the show, Games of Life, evoke a sense of exuberance. The body of work created during the lockdown reflect her proximity to nature as she changed her residence from the city of Paris to a small commune in Southwestern France. Her buoyant, delicate, and detailed figures which are present in the abundance of nature are accented by a bright palette that enhances the festive air and celebratory nature of her work. She creates a dream world brimming with characters that are metaphorical and have an imaginative presence. The precise detail, tapestry-like flow and poetic quality characterizes Maya Burman’s art as a meeting ground for her French and Indian roots. The sense of merriment and playful-ness in Maya’s artworks gives us hope and is a reminder of the happier times.
From the Curator’s Desk
“Maya Burman’s paintings evolve from a buoyant interplay of architecture and landscape. Gardens trail into interiors and brickwork arches frame forests, even as a parade of children animates the pictorial space with intimations of dance and music. These are landscapes of delight, alive with the afterimages of Renaissance art, in the midst of the contemporary moment. Some of the children in these works are modelled on the cherubs and zephyrs of Renaissance pageants. They play celestial music, while some of their peers engage in sports, pneumatic figures that seem suspended in zero-gravity states of delightfully slow motion. The moment is both now and forever, and these paintings are animated by the spirit of fantasia, in all its lightness and capacity for invoking unpredictable events. Burman’s palette of yellows, greens and pinks evokes a sumptuous fruitfulness and an organic connection with the cycles of the natural world, a connection that has been placed in jeopardy and to a great extent lost by humankind, in its exploitative rapacity.”
Text Ranjit Hoskote, Poet and Curator
Date 04-010-2022