Chila Kumari Burman

Chila Kumari Burman (b. 1957, Bootle, Liverpool) is a London based artist who has been active on the Global Art scene for more than two decades. She has worked experimentally across printmaking, painting, sculpture, photography and film since the mid-1980s. She completed her education from Leeds Polytechnic in BA in Fine Art and Graphic Design and later completed her Masters from Slade School of Fine Art in MA Fine Art (Printmaking). Chila Kumari Burman’s work is held in a number of public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wellcome Trust in London, and the Devi Foundation in New Delhi. Chila uses everyday materials in her work, giving new meaning to items which others may see as worthless, cheap or kitsch. In the tradition of graphic political satire, Burman articulates a critical position within contemporary post-colonial, consumption-saturated Britain.

Mostly creating on an autobiographical note, Chila Kumari Burman draws on fine and pop art imagery in intricate multi-layered works which explore Asian femininity and her personal family history. Bollywood bling merges with her childhood memories. Ice Cream has a particular significance in her work and references her childhood in Liverpool where her father, who arrived as an immigrant from India in the 1950s, owned an ice cream van and was a popular figure as he drove around selling ice cream for over thirty years. In recent works such as Fortune, Perfect Fit, and A moment to Herself (cibachrome and painterly laser prints), she explores issues of gender and race through the aesthetics of collecting. Dress accessories, lingerie, bhindhis, bras, flowers, hair-pieces, jewellery and make up allow her to play with the formal properties of these materials, working with repetition and patterns as well as with their allusions to the hyper-feminine, the sexual and the everyday.