As a contemporary visual artist, I depict my emotive responses to humanitarian and societal concerns across time and geographies. I believe in the aphorism that art has no borders, more so with the world becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent.

The works in the first few of my earlier solos portrayed my observations of the quotidian lives of people, especially of those living on the margins. In a later solo exhibition that featured works made during Covid, I depicted imagined realities of the pandemic and its impact on the psyche of those affected. My more recent body of works reflects my intense engagement with themes depicting the zeitgeist of the disquieting and conflict-ridden times that we are living in. The primary focus of the works of my last exhibition revolves around missing persons, based on events and situations, both real and imagined, across the globe. The portraits and visual narratives depict not so much the turmoil without, but more the trauma within. These tales of missing people are but a microcosm of the complex society we live, portraying the many facets of existence and evanescence, presence and absence, identity and obscurity.

I deploy multiple devices and visual languages for my art – from allegory and metaphor to poetry and literary allusions, to animals and objects as symbols. I experiment with various mediums, using varied textures and hues, to capture the nuances, range, and depth of human experience. While there is diversity in my art, my oeuvre has a definitive continuity in its manifestation as visual expression with a singular, personalized aesthetics to achieve compositional balance and spatial relationships.

Staying Alive: Solo Art exhibition

14–20 February, 2019  |  11am–7pm

Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi