Bhuri Bai

Born in 1968, Bhuri Baï made her first wall paintings at the age of ten in her village in the dis- trict of Jahuba, which lies on the border between Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat. After moving to Bhopal to find work she met Jagdish Swaminathan, the great figure of modern Indian art, theoretician, and cofounder of the Bharat Bhavan, the only Indian museum that places rural and urban art on equal standing. Bhuri Baï was one of the very first women in her tribe to paint on paper and canvas.

The forms she creates seem to float weightlessly in space. Composed of fields of bright colors like paper cut-outs (suggestive of Matisse), these supple shapes (not unlike Dalí) are sprinkled with colored dots, not closely aligned, like those of Australian aboriginals, but sparsely scattered. The dots, which are in primary and secondary colors, are distributed across the colored fields. Functioning as anchoring points, dots of light, and, at the same time, spots of energy, their visual effectiveness is paradoxically both powerful and short-lived, somewhere between intimacy and the cosmic.

These themes, which are often seen in the work of other primitive painters, might be considered metaphors of the ravaging of the land, or as the relations between man and animals, the domestic and wild environments, nature and the modern world.