Amrita Shergill is one of the few accomplished women artists of India. She is also the most expensive women artist in Indian Art. Her painting the ‘Village Scene’ fetched $1.6 million at an auction. During her time she earned the sobriquet "the Frida Khalo of India."

Born in Budapest to a Hungarian mother partly of Jewish extraction, and a Sikh father, Sher-Gil studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she absorbed influences from Gaugin to contemporary Hungarian art. The five years that she spent in Paris were a period of experimentation, of trying on different personae and exploring her own hybrid identity. Sometimes wearing western clothing and sometimes wearing a sari, Sher-Gil was fully aware of her ‘exotic’ beauty. .

Her early work often reflected the academic style in which she was trained. However, she also began to experiment with ways of representing the non-western body in paintings such as Sleep (1933), which depicts her younger sister Indira. She admired Paul Gauguin’s depictions of the South Sea Islands and his stylistically simplified, yet symbolically charged Tahitian nudes. Gauguin’s influence became explicit in Self Portrait as Tahitian (1934), in which Sher-Gil appears naked to the waist, in a three-quarter profile and looking beyond the frame of the picture.

Amrita Shergil Profile and Images