Untitled (Nude)

Using methods she had learned in France while studying Byzantine and Renaissance painting in the 1960s, Anjolie Ela Menon's canvases have a luminescent quality from her layered and burnished technique. She states: "That quality of subdued brilliance emerging from layers of glazes and the hard gloss of the surface, the landscapes bathed in the greenish light of Sienna, were to influence my technique permanently. I wanted to achieve that pristine surface where there was never any muddiness or opacity, even the whites glowed with an inner light." ("Anjolie Ela Menon - In conversation with Isana Murti," 9 August 2005, ) . In the 1970s, after experiencing childbirth and the death of her father, Menon's works became highly personalized manifestations of her emotional state. The sorrowful nude figure here bears an iconic resemblance to proto-Renaissance depictions of the Virgin Mary.