Distinguished Speakers' Series
Lalitha Lajmi
In conversation with Jesal Thacker & Lina Vincent
09 September 2021 | 17:00 PM
Join us for this Distinguished Speakers' Series together with Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai, where we invite India’s senior most printmaker and woman artist, the iconic Lalitha Lajmi who has contributed to the visual arts for over 7 decades; in a candid conversation with Jesal Thacker, Founder & Director Bodhana Arts & Research Foundation and Lina Vincent, Art Historian, Curator, Writer and Researcher to speak to our audiences.
About Lalitha Lajmi
Lalitha Lajmi, born in 1932, in Kolkata, is a prominent painter and printmaker. She is a self-taught artist raised in a family deeply involved in the arts. She started painting in the early sixties, when she participated in a group exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai.
At the same gallery she had her first solo exhibition in 1961.Over an illustrious career spanning 5 decades, she had several exhibitions at both national and international platforms. She has exhibited her work in India, (Germany) and US. Lajmi has given lectures in India and UK as well. She also showcased her work in Graphic workshop of Prof. Paul Lingerine in Mumbai and two of her etchings were selected for "India Festival" 1985, USA. Her work has been displayed in various famous art galleries including Prithvi Art Gallery, Pundole Art Gallery, Apparao Gallery, Chennai, Pundole Gallery, Mumbai, Hutheesing Centre for Visual Art, Ahmedabad, Art Heritage, New Delhi, Gallery Gay, Germany, Prints Exhibition at Max Muller Bhavan, Kolkata etc. .
Recent solo exhibitions include 'Memory Roll'2021 Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai, ‘The Minds Cupboards' 2013 at India Art Festival and Clark House Initiative; ‘The Masque of Life ‘2014 Jehangir Art Gallery and ‘Performers' 2015, Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai.
It was in the late 1970s that she started evolving a deeply individualistic style and began to make etchings, and to work with oils and watercolors. She is known for her use of auto-biographical elements, imaginative narratives of human relationships, and a tryst with psychoanalysis; in her vast repertoire, she has painted and published art works that sit on many panes of genre, technique and concept.
Lalitha Lajmi is the sister of Hindi film director, producer, and actor (late) Guru Dutt. Her work has also been influenced by Indian films such as those made by Dutt, Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor, besides having as a guiding force in the build-up of her career, K.H. Ara (who was a member of the Progressives). Her brother Devi Dutt was a producer and Atma Ram was also a director, she is the mother of Kalpana Lajmi who was a pioneer of parallel cinema in India as well as the cousin of Shyam Benegal the screenwriter and director of films now called Alternate or New Cinema.
Lajmi was the recipient of the Government of India Junior Fellowship from 1979 to 1983. She won the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) Travel Grant for International Contemporary Indian Women Artists Show for 50 Years of Indian Independence organized by Mills College of Art at Oakland, California in 1997 and Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) Travel Grant to East and West Germany for two Exhibitions in 1983.
Lajmi lives and works in Bombay.
About Jesal Thacker
Jesal Thacker, an artist by training, chose to pursue scholarship in art instead of art practice. A graduate with a degree in painting from Sir J.J. School of Art, she set up Bodhana Arts and Research Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that engages with researching and publishing books on Indian art. Also an independent curator, she has curated several exhibitions, Prabhakar Barwe’s retrospective being the most recent project in 2019, exhibited at the National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai and New Delhi).
Jesal has a passion for investigating, and questions history with the purpose of re-contextualising it constantly. She is engaged in studying the history of India’s modernism with a focus on abstraction, and in renewing the art history of this period with appropriate scholarship and meticulous archives.