Woman in a Landscape

Gurminder Sikand was born in Punjab, India and moved to the UK aged 10. She studied art, graduating from Birmingham Polytechnic in 1983 and soon after firmly found her distinctive visual language, combining her British art historical training with imagery from Hindu religion and myth. Sikand cited artists such as Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse as inspirations.

The anatomy of the reclining figure within Woman in a Landscape is loosely rendered and her flowing hair blends with the swirling landscape and skies behind her. The melding of woman and landscape is a common motif in Sikand’s work and represents her belief in feminism and ecology being inextricably linked. The dream-like sky could be swirling clouds or the universe as a whole, and is framed by a patterned border. The use of this border may have been inspired by folk paintings from the Mithila region in India, which Sikand cited as a reference. [For an example of this type of painting, see 50885 in the Sainsbury Centre collection https://sainsburycentre.ac.uk/art-and-objects/50885-moti-ram-salheshs-brother-fighting-with-panma/]

Sikand’s image is rendered in a combination of ink, gouache and watercolour, offering different textural qualities with fine black outlines capturing watery pools of vibrant colour. She said of these media:

‘… gouache, watercolour and ink, [are] media I find especially appealing to work with. Being water based, these materials allow for the possibilities of continuing and reworking paintings weeks after they were first started. This long gestation period (between the start and completion of a picture) is rather like the time taken by a seed to germinate. I think it lends an organic quality to the paintings.’ [1]

Woman in a Landscape was the first work by Sikand to be acquired by a public collection after her death in 2021. Her works are also in the collections of other major collections such as the British Museum, the Arts Council Collection and Nottingham City Museums.

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