Sakti Burman was born in Calcutta in 1935. He studied art in Calcutta and Paris. From the mid-50s, he has been living in Paris. However, he has been visiting and exhibiting in India quite regularly.

Sakti Burman's paintings weave myriad motfis culled from imagination and reality into a filigree of dreamscapes. With their soothing colors and rich textures these works combine the formal and stylstic values of Renaissance and Baroque art with native Indian myths and folklore. From the 1970s onwards Sakti's works display a greater formal clarity.

Burman is a fine lithographer who can achieve a range of tonal and textural variations. He has illustrated several books such a collection of Mallarme's poems. He has also published portfolios of his lithographs.

Burman's images are steeped in romanticism and fantasy. Europe and India are fused in his imagination. Exotic birds and blooms sprout from unlikely places. Sensuously painted women loll about in a mythical or oneiric landscape. The surface is usually textured like aging frescos.

Born in Kolkata in 1935, Sakti Burman studied at the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Kolkata, and later at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris.


Burman uses pointillism and a marbling technique achieved by blending oils with acrylics to create fresco-like works on paper and canvas. Burman’s paintings often evoke a surrealist feel, referencing multiplicities of time and place. His art drew extensively from Hindu and European mythology, as well as from the artist’s own memories.


Suggesting surrealism, his paintings are populated by humans, animals and cityscapes that are dreamlike in appearance. His defining oeuvre owes largely to his technique of marbling, which he arrived at after years of experimentation.


Burman traveled to Italy in 1958 and his encounter with the frescoes of Giotto, Piero de la Francesca and Simone Martini inspired him to assimilate their monumentality and textures in his works.


The artist had his first solo exhibition in 1954 in Kolkata, and has since exhibited widely across the world including at venues like the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Piccadilly Gallery, London; Galerie Doucet et Coutureau, Paris; Galleria Nuovo Sagittario, Milan; and Galerie Sagar, Zurich.


Burman has participated in several shows, some of the most recent including The Beholder’s Share by Jehangir Art Gallery and Art Musings in Mumbai in 2016; A Private Universe by Art Alive Gallery in New Delhi in 2015; Rituals and Reasons: Invoking the Sensual in Art, at Apparao Galleries in Chennai in 2014; The Wonder of it All, a retrospective exhibition by Pundole Art Gallery and Apparao Galleries in New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai in 2012, Archetype and Enraputured Gaze at Aicon Gallery in London and New York in 2009; Faces of Indian Art organised by Art Alive at the Visual Art Gallery, New Delhi; Understanding Oneness in Diversity at Kitab Mahal, Mumbai; An Evening in Paris …Rome…London at Gallery Sanskriti, Kolkata; and Resonance organized by Art Musings at Museum Gallery, Mumbai, all in 2007.


Burman was awarded the Medaille d’Argent au Salon de Montmorency and the Prix des Etrangers, École des Beaux-Arts, Paris in 1956. Sakti Burman lives and works in Paris.