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Artistic Journey of Amrita Sher- Gil

Born in 1913, Amrita Sher-Gil was a Hungarian-Indo painter. She spent her early years in Budapest with her family and later on moved to Shimla, a hill station in India. Known as the Pioneer of modern Indian Art, Amrita started her formal art education at the age of eight. At the age of 16, she entered the Ecole dex Beaux-Arts in Paris. The artist gained her first recognition at the age of 19 for her painting titled ‘Young Girls’, she received a  gold medal for her painting in 1933. 

Amrita Sher-Gil is also known as the Indian Frida Kahlo was greatly influenced by the lives of Indian women in 1930. However, her early works predominantly reflect western influence and techniques. The artist often painted her friends and sister as subjects and also ended up making a series of self-portraits. Her oeuvre of the painting showed a gradual transition after her return to India and it was nowhere similar to what she was doing earlier. Sher-Gil started experimenting with the Indian elements and techniques in her paintings that led her to rediscover her language of art. Her paintings often depicted scenes like women at a wedding, going to the market, sitting and chatting with friends. She painted ordinary scenes with utmost beauty and simplicity. 
Complexities of her life- she was of mixed parentage and her art school background in Paris made her both, an insider and outsider, as did her ambivalent sexuality- promoted her to constantly reinvent her visual language. She sought to reconcile her modern sensibility with her enthusiastic response to traditional art-historical resources. 

Sher-Gil is considered to be one of the most significant artists of Pre- Colonial era. She was also the youngest and only Asian artist to be elected as an Associate of the Grand Salon in Paris. The works of Amrita Sher-Gil have been declared as National Art Treasures by the Government of India. Most of her paintings adorn the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. Her paintings are among the most expensive by Indian women painters today, although few acknowledged her work when she was alive.










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