Description
About the artist
Anjolie Ela Menon is a eminent painter and muralist with a body of work that spans six decades and multiple genres and mediums. Menon is known for her luminous paintings on masonite, made with translucent layers of paint that are burnished to a soft glow.
Anjolie Ela Menon was born (1940) in Burnpur, Bengal. She went to Lawrence School, Lovedale in Tamil Nadu. By the age of 15, when she left school, she had already sold a few paintings. She briefly studied at the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art, Mumbai, and later earned a degree in English literature from Miranda House, Delhi. At the age of 18, she held a solo exhibition with 53 paintings of a variety of styles. She obtained a French Government scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1959 to 1961. During this period she travelled extensively in Europe and West Asia studying Romanesque and Byzantine art.
Anjolie Ela Menon has done over 35 solo shows and many group shows in India and abroad and her works in several museums across the world.
Menon was awarded the Padma Shree by the Indian Government in 2000. In the same year, she was nominated to be on the board of trustees of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) – the only visual artist to have ever been nominated. The veteran artist was conferred with the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2007. She was awarded Kalidas Samman for Visual Arts from the Madhya Pradesh government in 2018.
She lives and works in New Delhi.