Few contemporary Indian artists have created work of such depth and beauty as Anjolie Ela Menon. Her paintings reveal an extraordinary sensibility, profoundly individual in perception yet diverse in its sympathies, Indian in subject yet dwelling in some undefined nudes, interiors and landscapes each markedly of her own world.

Best known are her portraits of women innocent or haunted, but all distinctively faces created by Menon. Many of the portraits are of her friends and her family, revealing the passage of their lives and their experience . She paints over paneled doors and windows which provide her with natural grids to contain a sense of fantasy and colour. Within these structures, the subjects are framed- often fragile and aloneeloquent in their solitude.

Give Anjolie Ela Menon outstanding oeuvre over the past three decades there is now a widespread interest in it. But it has been difficult to see her development as an artist over the past 35 years because most of her works are in private collections in India and abroad. The full-colour reproductions on this site fill a lacuna.

By drawing on these collections, this finely produced volume provides and overview of Menons work, revealing her evolution as a person and as an artist. It also contains an essay on Menon’s life by the well know art critic Isana Murti, and an interview with the artist by Indira Dayal. This site is the first location on the net to showcase the work of Anjolie Ela Menon. Anjolie Ela Menon was born in 1940 in West Bengal. She went to school in the Nilgiri Hills, Tamil Naidu, and thereafter had a brief spell at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay.

Subsequently she earned a degree in English Literature from Delhi University. After holding exhibitions in Bombay and Delhi in the late 1950’s, Menon worked and studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1961-62. Before returning home, she traveled extensively in Europe and West Asia, studying Romanesque and Byzantine art.

Since then she has lived and worked at home in India, England, the USA, Germany and Russia. She has had over thirty solos and several group shows. In addition to paintings in private and corporate collections, her works have been acquired by major museums in India and abroad. She is also well known for he murals and has represented India at the Algiers Biennale and in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Anjolie Ela Menon, who makes her home in Delhi, is married and has two sons.