Gurminder Sikand

About Gurminder Sikand (1960-2021)

Born in the Punjab, Gurminder moved to Britain with her family at the age of ten. She graduated in Fine Art from Birmingham Polytechnic and over the course of her career, which spanned from the mid-1980s to the early 2020s, had several solo and group exhibitions. She participated in many of the pioneering Black and Asian art exhibitions of the late 1980s and 1990s, Tim Hilton describing her in The Guardian (19th January, 1990) as 'one of the best of the new British-Asian women artists'. Gurminder also featured in many women's art shows, including "Myth, Dream and Fable" (1992), in which Paula Rego was one of the four other exhibitors. Paintings by Gurminder are held in the collections of the Arts Council, Cartwright Hall in Bradford, Nottingham City Council, Walsall Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Museum and Art Gallery, among other places. She features in several catalogues and in Celeste-Marie Bernier's book, Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965-2015 (University of California Press, 2019). Her paintings appear on book covers for Heinemann and Oxford University Press.

Gurminder arrived at her distinctive vision through the blending and adaptation of South Asian and European artistic traditions. The former includes Mithila, Kalighat and Pahari paintings. Among the very many Western influences are Chagall, Picasso, Bridget Riley, and medieval nativity paintings. Gurminder's multi-decade focus on the representation of women and trees combines her fascination with the tree of life with her commitment to feminism and ecology. Her reading in the 1980s of the Chipko movement generated her paintings named after that movement and informed the work that she produced into the twenty-first century.

Gurminder died in 2021. Her work is attracting keen interest from a new generation of curators. Posthumous displays of it include paintings in group shows at London's Barbican Centre and Tate Britain. See the news page of this site for updates.