Sakti Burman was born in Calcutta in 1935. He studied art in Calcutta and Paris. From the mid-50s, he has been living in Paris. However, he has been visiting and exhibiting in India quite regularly.

Burman is a fine lithographer who can achieve an incredible range of tonal and textural variations. He has illustrated several books such a collection of Mallarme's poems. He has also published portfolios of his lithographs.

Burman's images are steeped in romanticism and fantasy. Europe and India are fused in his imagination. Exotic birds and blooms sprout from unlikely places. Sensuously painted women loll about in a mythical or oneiric landscape. The surface is usually textured like aging frescos.

Educated at the Government School of Art & Craft, Calcutta, Sakti Burman is today a well-known Paris-based painter of Indian origin. He acknowledges that his experiences as a young painter in France and his travels to Italy and exposure to its Renaissance fresco paintings influenced his evolution. Described as an ‘Alchemist of Dreams’, Sakti skilfully blends the Italian fresco tradition and the classical Ajanta (Buddhist) cave murals in India to create a world where fantasy, fable and poetry coalesce and flowers, trees, birds and imaginary anthropomorphic creatures co-exist in perfect harmony. 

Sakti Burman is a very well-known Indian painter who has lived and worked in Paris for the past thirty-five years. He is one of a small group of Indian emigres - a group that includes S.H. Raza, Nalini Malani, Krishna Reddy, and Arun Bose - who have found an artistic home in that City of Light. Sakti Burman's work deeply invokes his two worlds - the India of his childhood and youth and the France of his adult life.

Sakti Burman inhabits a world of dreams and fantasies. In his delicately chiarascuroed works live half-human creatures, snakes that grow out of maiden's heads, birds that sport a full head of hair, and harlequins, and dancers, and circus acrobats ... And then there are the children, acutely observing, frolicking in the field and seeming so much like little adults. It is as if they alone can appreciate the mystery and the fantasy of the world around them.

He draws faces in a style reminiscent of Greek frescoes and the works evoke shades of Picasso. And yet there is a flatness to the style that reminds the viewer of Indian miniature.

"Reality mixed up with dreams appears in my work repeatedly. In art, memory and the present time interact constantly. My work attempts to recreate, reflect and represent an enchanted world where the memory of the real, fantasy and legend have a direct relation to the present ..."