Born in 1968, Bhuri Bai made her first mural paintings at the age of ten in her village in the Jahuba District, on the border of Madhya Pradesh and Gujrat. In settling in Bhopal to find work she met Jagdish Swaminathan, great figure of modern Indian art, theorist and co-founder of the Bharat Bhavan, the only museum to put on an equal footing rural and urban contemporary art. Bhuri Bai was one of the very first women of her tribe to paint on paper and canvas.

The forms of Bhuri Bai have this specificity of seeming to float in space, as in a state of weightlessness. Made of flat areas of bright colors similar to paper cuts (one thinks of Matisse), these soft forms (one thinks of Dali) are studded with colored dots, not edge to edge, as do the Australian Aborigines, but scattered.

Acrylic on paper 1999, 30x40 cm.

The points of colors, also vibrant, disperse themselves on these solid flat areas. Anchor points, points of light, or again, and at the same time, of energy, provide a visual efficiency, paradoxically powerful and evanescent, between the intimate and the cosmic.

Many of these subjects depict and reveal, not without a kind of humor that could be described as microgravity, the conflict between the woman, as a creator, and the man, as a predator. These themes, which are often found in other early painters, may also be seen as metaphors for the theft of land, the relationship between man and animal, the domestic and the wild, the nature and the modern world.

Bhuri Bai was invited, with Jangarh Singh Shyam, in Australia where she performed works in the surrounding of the greatest aborigines painters who, like her and probably other primitive people, share this ancestral view according to which every body is made out of particles.

Bhuri Bai participates in numerous exhibitions, including "Freedom" Cima Gallery, Kolkata 2008, "Now That the Trees Have Spoken" Pundole Gallery Mumbai 2009, "Other Masters of India" Musée du Quai Branly, Paris 2010. One of her paintings was presented in 2007 by Sotheby's New York during the sale for the benefit of the future Museum of Modern Art in Kolkata.

Acrylic on paper 1999, 50x65 cm.