Lalitha Lajmi

Lalitha Lajmi
sans titre, 2011
aquarelle sur papier Arches/ watercolour on arch paper
76,7 x 57 cm

Lalitha Lajmi
sans titre, 2018
série “Performer”
aquarelle sur papier / watercolour on paper
76,6 x 57,1 cm

Lalitha Lajmi
sans titre, 2015
aquarelle sur papier / watercolour on paper
49,5 x 41,1 cm

Lalitha Lajmi
Woman & Child with 3 birds, 2015
aquarelle sur papier / watercolour on paper
52,9 x 41,7 cm

Lalitha Lajmi (1932-2023) was born in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) into a family open to art and literature. Her uncle, B.B. Benegal, himself an artist, introduced Lalitha and her brother to art. Every Sunday, he would sneak them into the cinema where he worked. During the 40s, the two children were able to discover hundreds of films from the very early golden age of Bollywood cinema. Later, Benegal gave the girl a box of paints, and the boy a camera.

During these same years, the family moved to Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Her brother looked for work in the film industry, while Lajmi was forced into marriage.

A young mother at 22, she taught herself to handle acrylic and oil paints, as well as watercolors. She alternated between parental duties, feminist readings (from Virginia Woolf to Eunice de Souza) and evening classes at The Sir J.J. School of Art, where she learned to make copper engravings and prints. She rubbed shoulders with a world of intellectuals in the company of her brother, who, under the pseudonym Guru Dutt, had a real reputation in the film world.

Lajmi began psychoanalysis at the age of thirty, obsessively recording her dreams. Psychoanalysis offered her a set of tools for dissolving the thin line between reality and fiction, in waking life as well as in sleep. It was in her watercolors, in particular, that she used and worked the materials of her dreams.

In 1961, at the age of 29, she had her very first solo exhibition at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai. She exhibited a series of landscapes, still lifes and nudes, in pastel and oil. In 1964, tragedy struck her family: after years of battling depression, Guru Dutt was found dead in his apartment. Overcome by grief, Lalitha Lajmi wrote in 1987 that, in the years that followed, she contracted a mysterious incurable allergy and stopped sleeping.

Perfecting her art, she began to play with shapes and genres, presenting bodies in an abstract, quasi-spectral form. Gradually making a name for herself, she was awarded numerous grants, including the Junior Grant, from the Indian government from 1979 to 1983.

In 1997, she was awarded the Indian Council Travel Grant for the International Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Women Artists, organized by Mills College of Art in Oakland, California, to mark the 50th anniversary of India’s independence.

In 2023 (shortly before her death), the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai devoted a major retrospective to her.

Solo exhibitions

Group exhibitions