Room 1

Young Girls
Amrita’s sister Indira sits on the left clothed in chic European garb, while the partially undressed figure in the foreground is a French friend, Denise Proutaux. The two women, one poised and assured, the other more awkward with her face buried beneath streaming hair, have been as embodying different sides of the artist herself. This painting was awarded a Gold Medal at the Grand Salon in 1933.
Self Portrait as Tahitian
Sher-Gil encountered the paintings of Paul Gauguin during a visit to the National Gallery in London. Gauguin used expressive colour and stylised figures to represent life on Tahiti, and his work influenced Sher-Gil’s own depictions of the non-western body. In Self Portrait as Tahitian she self-consciously plays on her status as the exotic ‘other’ in metropolitan Paris. It is likely that she worked from a photograph.

Room 2

Three Girls
Her first major painting on returning to India, Three Girls shows Sher-Gil beginning to move away from the academic style of painting that she had studied in Paris Presenting the figures in close foreground, there is no attempt to establish their surroundings. Nonetheless, their resigned expressions and passive postures suggest the artist’s close understanding of their plight. As Sher-Gil wrote, ‘I am personally trying to be, through the medium of line, colour and design, an interpreter of the life of the people, particularly the life of the poor and sad.’

Hill Women
In her letters, Sher-Gil expressed her disdain for contemporary representations of India which depicted a beautiful landscape while acknowledging the suffering of the poor only as a sentimental picturesque detail. Tellingly, her own paintings focus on people rather than their surroundings. The critic Yashodhara Dalmia has praised the balance of form and content in this work: ‘the silhouette of women standing in a grave silence, reminiscent of tombstones, is in effect an elegy to the living’.

South Indian Villagers Going to Market
In 1936-7, Sher-Gil undertook a trip through southern India, and saw the 7th and 8th century cave paintings at Ajanta for the first time. The large fresco-like paintings that followed capture her impressions of the south, but also represent her direct response to Ajanta, which she admired as a supreme example of classical Indian art. Here she brings a new sense of movement and colour to her depiction of Indian life, compared to the more static scenes that she portrayed at Shimla.

Room 3

Woman on Charpai
One of Sher-Gil’s recurrent themes is the isolated lifestyle of women living on feudal estates, immersed in their private thoughts and desires. She acknowledged the influence of Moghul miniatures on this work, which she described as ‘a girl in red flowered clothes (the Punjabi dress, tight red trousers, shirt and veil)… reclining in a charpoy, its posts of an incandescent red rose round her like tongues of flame… It is a sensual picture, but not sensual in the effete rather repulsive manner of some of our good Bombay fine art exhibitors.’