fbpx Biennale Arte 2024 | Amrita Sher-Gil
La Biennale di Venezia

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Amrita Sher-Gil

Budapest, Hungary, 1913 – 1941, Lahore, India


  • TUE - SUN
    20/04 > 30/09
    11 AM - 7 PM

    01/10 > 24/11
    10 AM - 6 PM
  • Central Pavilion
  • Admission with ticket

Amrita Sher-Gil was born in 1913 in Budapest to Umrao Singh Sher-Gil – a Sikh aristocrat, scholar, and self-taught photographer – and Marie Antoinette Gottesman, a Hungarian opera singer. The Head of a Girl (1937) follows the style of her later work, though the subject is not specifically Indian. The head and shoulders of a young girl with large almond-shaped eyes and an oval face framed by a heavy fringe bears an uncanny similarity to a black-and-white photograph of a young Sher-Gil taken between 1920 and 1924, possibly by her father. While she painted several self-portraits in the early years, there are none of her as a young girl, and though she does not ascribe it as such, it is likely that the photograph served as a reference for the painting. In 2007, the Tate Modern showed thirty paintings by Amrita Sher-Gil in one of its first major exhibitions of an Indian artist.

—Latika Gupta

Central Pavilion
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Biennale Arte
Biennale Arte