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Studio 1 : Inner World
There is a self that exists only in private, unseen even by those closest to us. The artists in this room turn the figure inward, away from the world's gaze, toward thought, memory, and feeling that resist easy translation. Here, stillness is not absence but depth. A bowed head, a closed eye, a body turned from the viewer, these become thresholds into interior life, where solitude is not loneliness but a kind of sanctuary. To look at these works is to be reminded that every figure carries an unseen world within it, one that painting alone can gesture toward.
Nityan Unnikrishnan's deliberate "anti-skill" turns the familiar strange from within, Zoo teeming with a bittersweet, inward unease. Anupam Sud's brooding, self-absorbed subjects withhold more than they reveal, Dining with Ego showing a couple who share a table but never a moment, while Untitled - 45 turns that same probing gaze onto a single figure lost in private thought. In Apu Crawling and Apu’s Space, M. Krishna Reddy transforms his daughter Apu’s small world into elemental forms and colours. Atul Dodiya’s The National Art Center Gangtok imagines an art museum for a city without one, quietly reflecting on the uneven distribution of cultural institutions in India.
Aditya Pande’s Phantom Foetus Syndrome turns lines and circles into a restless, inward energy. Karishma D’Souza’s Santa Cruz and The Village offer tranquil landscapes populated by solitary figures, exploring light as both a visual and metaphysical presence. Sumakshi Singh and Mohan Verma’s Staircase, cut from banana fibre paper, spirals inward as a fragile architecture suspended between structure and dissolution. Kulpreet Singh carries the unspoken weight of memory in Fossils of Force (Chair 1), its letterpress marks a private act of memorial and resistance.
P S Jalaja's Bitter-Sweet History holds its social and political charge close, resisting easy resolution in favour of quiet, private reckoning. C Bhagyanath's layered ink figures hover between becoming and dissolving, Secret Dialogue capturing bodies caught mid-thought in a fleeting, half-formed choreography. Manjunath Kamath opens empty, composite spaces across Then It Happened, Pink Lane in Karaikudi, White Shadow in Pondicherry, and, Monk And His Belongings, each one a private venue for invented history and nostalgia.
