Puneet Kaushik is a perceptive artist who through his work tries to probe the very essence of being. His work is intensely personal, defining abstract expression in his emotional, mental and social space. His work often exhibit a fascination with the human body in all its visceral detail, including an abundant use of the colour red. The impact and scale of his sculptural work is enunciated by the delicate use of wire-mesh along with traditional textiles and materials. He attempts a manifestation of duality, a fine balance of light and shadow, gravity and lightness, silence and speech, and most importantly, of the inner and outer self. He is scratching the surface to expose the core in order to connect with the subtle self.

Puneet Kaushik’s works have been exhibited at Gallery Espace; Alliance Francaise de Delhi; Takashimaya, Tokyo, Japan; Kala Art Gallery, San Francisco; Modern Primitive Gallery, Atlanta and many others.

He has participated in several art workshops and camps and is the recipient of the Junior Research Fellowship, Department of Culture, Government of India (2000-2002) and was Nehru Research Associate, Jawaharlal Nehru Trust (1998-2000).

The artist lives and works in New Delhi.

Dr. Paula Sengupta is an artist-pedagogue, art writer and curator resident in Kolkata. She graduated in Painting from the College of Art, New Delhi, followed by an MFA and PhD in Printmaking from Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan. She is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Graphics-Printmaking, and former Dean of the Faculty of Visual Arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. She taught as Guest Faculty at the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Kolkata from 1999-2003. She served as Member of the Board of Governors at the Indian Institute of Management, Shillong from 2017-25; Member of the Governing Body, Indian College of Art & Draughtsmanship, Kolkata in 2025; and is currently Member of the Advisory Board, Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata and Member of the Board of Trustees, India Foundation for the Arts, Bengaluru.

Paula has been the recipient of the UGC Research Fellowship for doctoral studies (1993-98), the Artist-In-Residence Fellowship at Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, California (1997-98), Guest Artist at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, Stuttgart under the INDART Artist Exchange Programme (2000), CWIT Research Grant & British Council, Kolkata Grant for independent research in the UK (2007), Artist-in-Residence at the Britto Arts Trust, Dhaka (2008), and the Devi Award 2026 from the New Indian Express Group.

Trained as a printmaker, Paula’s repertoire as an artist includes broadsheets, artist’s books, objects, installation, animation, and community art projects. She works across mediums that include printmaking, textiles and embroidery, papermaking, drawing, moving image, and much else. Paula’s work addresses gender binaries, enforced migration, loss of home, heritage and environment, and a concern for conservation of societies, communities and ecologies. Her language is distinctly feminine, therefore laying claim to methods and materials that underline feminist thought.

Paula Sengupta is author of The Printed Picture: Four Centuries of Indian Printmaking published by DAG, New Delhi and Foreign & Indigenous Influences in Indian Printmaking with LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, Saarbrucken, Germany. She has also contributed to numerous publications for almost three decades now. 

Her curatorial projects include PURVAI: Printmaking in Eastern India – Pedagogy to Practice for Emami Art, Kolkata 2026; Living a Dark Night for The Kala Chaupal Trust, Gurgaon 2021-23; a soul (un)gendered: Anupam Sud – A Retrospective for DAG MODERN & KNMA, Delhi in 2019-20; Ghare Baire at the Old Currency Building, Kolkata for DAG MODERN and the Archaeological Survey of India in 2019; Popular Prints and the Freedom Struggle at the Drishyakala Museum, Red Fort, Delhi for DAG MODERN and the Archaeological Survey of India in 2019; the landmark exhibition Trajectories: 19^th-21^st Century Printmaking from India and Pakistan for the Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah, UAE in 2014; and six editions of The Printed Picture: Four Centuries of Indian Printmaking for DAG MODERN, India  from 2012-18.

One of the doyennes of the Indian art world, Nilima Sheikh’s engagement with art has spanned four decades. Her beautifully ephemeral landscapes using tempera on handmade paper, strongly influenced by Chinese, Persian, Central Asian, pre-Renaissance European and North Indian schools of tempera painting offer to the viewer exquisite narratives on loss, migration and exile. Her depiction of narration eschews the use of perspective in favour of a style of representation that seems to exist outside time. There is a visual and textual layering where geographies are infused with diverse histories. Many of her paintings explore the idea of the return to a site of past violence, especially Kashmir. Others like When Champa Grew Up centre on the experience of womanhood. Each of her works, offers an extraordinary density and narrative depth and also, a commitment to feminist realities. Nilima Sheikh’s detailed etching of the expressions of her characters, the glowing, textile-like colours and her concern for traditional art forms (a legacy of her mentor KG Subramanyan’s training) all come together to illuminate scrolls, curtains, boxes and even a whole shamiana. Her works are defined by richness and subtlety conflating ancient mythology and modern history.

In her long and illustrious career, Nilima Sheikh has shown her works at Documenta XIV; Gallery Espace, New Delhi; Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia; Alexander Ochs Gallery, Berlin; the First Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa and many others. She has painted sets for theatrical productions like Umrao and Vivadi which were shown in Delhi. In addition, she has also illustrated children’s books like Saare Mausam Achche by Safdar Hashmi. She has published several essays on art in books, journals and artists’ catalogues since 1971.

The artist lives and works in Baroda and Delhi.

Mekhala Bahl (b.1980) is a New Delhi-based contemporary printmaker who works across several mediums including paint, ink, pencil work and quilting. Random lines of varying thicknesses are etched across the surface of her abstract paintings and sculptures, a recent addition to her oeuvre, appearing like fresh or faded scars, and occasionally, aligning to form pared down shapes of objects, or meandering into loops and squiggles that seem like an idiosyncratic hieroglyphic. The resultant matrix is akin to a mindscape, with coded hints at things, people or incidents, real or imagined, or the texture of human skin – variegated, mottled, wizened, and marked, seemingly, by the effects of time and the conditions of being.

Collage is integral to Mekhala’s practice, and she constructs her canvases using multiple art-making processes and materials, such as the translucent sewing pattern paper which she pastes on her canvas, incorporating the printed matter into her works, and also subverting it. The result is sophisticated, open-ended, and playful, drawing viewers into her canvases and inviting them to invest the abstract forms with their own meaning.

Mekhala trained at College of Art, Delhi and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, USA. In a career spanning nearly two decades, she has participated in artist residencies in Japan, North America and France, and has shown her work in prestigious international exhibitions and art fairs. Mekhala received the G.W. Hodge Ritchie Award for Excellence in Printmaking (US) in 2002.

Manisha Gera Baswani (B. 1967) is a visual artist creating cultural landscapes of connections across Asian traditions, weaving expressions that comprise painting, photography, sculpture and poetic writing.

Perforated paper drawings have predominated Baswani’s recent artistic output, growing out of a personal encounter with pain and disease. What began, some years ago, as depictions of organs – the human heart, brain, and spinal cord –took on, over time, a life of its own, as both medium and mode of expression, to become a fully formed visual language that Baswani deploys with painterly precision and expressive freedom, adding minute effects with pen or delicate brush to create intricate forms and textures that draw on the drama of light and dark, of white and black. Recently, Baswani has turned to textile as an organic extension of the pin drawings, reworking the visual vocabulary in the new medium of mulmul (or soft linen), embroidered in the chikankari style.

Baswani is also the curator and creator of the legacy photographic project ‘Artist through the Lens’, which intimately documents studios of artists and denizens of the arts community across the Indian subcontinent over the last two decades. A selection of the works from the project was displayed recently at Whitechapel Gallery, London, as part of the exhibition, ‘A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920-2020’.

‘Postcards from Home’, an aligned sister series, is an historic documentation of 47 artists from India and Pakistan, with shared history and lineages torn apart by the 1947 Partition. It is also a homage to Baswani’s parents’ memories of the ‘home’ they left behind as they moved to India. The series is currently on display at a year-long exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University.

Baswani has also curated her teacher and legendary artist A Ramachandran’s retrospective solo exhibition ‘The Changing Mood of the Lotus Pond and Insignificant Incarnations’ (Vadehra Art Gallery, 2018). A dedicated arts educator and community builder, she has shared the genesis, spirit and evolution of her unique art practice across platforms such as TEDx (2019).

Baswani lives and works in Gurugram near New Delhi, with her husband and sons.

Harendra Kushwaha was born in a small village in the Terai foothills of Nepal, along the border with India. A latecomer to professional art, he studied art at Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata on an Indian Council of Cultural Relations scholarship, completing his graduation in 2013 and post-graduation in 2015.

Kushwaha’s art is constructed from paper which he cuts painstakingly into wafer-thin strips, colours with graphite or pigment, and sometimes weaves or stitches with cotton thread. This process of immersive making is intrinsic to Kushwaha’s practice, which is rooted in the local – the remote village in Nepal where he grew up before moving to Kolkata to study and make art, and where his family still lives. Often, his paper relief sculptures evoke the textures or contours of the Nepal countryside – the terrace farms which form ridges along the Terai hills, the straggly hay laid out to dry under the roof, the matted walls of humble village homes, and so on. Even the paper Kushwaha uses is hand-made in Nepal.

Kushwaha was the recipient of the prestigious CIMA award in 2017.

Through Dilip Chobisa’s constructed rendition of the mystery, the idea of the hidden is formed by what is revealed. This is achieved by way of a curtain, a hallway, a beam of light or a suggestive stairway. He disregards the laws of architecture, yet creates an order of intrigue and curiosity. His drawings are defined by light or the lack of it, suggesting dark silences and pronounced emptiness. He challenges the limits of perception and makes visible the possibility of a space beyond the defined. He also dabbles with photography.

The artist has participated in several group shows including Working Space—around memory and perception, curated by Roobina Karode and presented by Paradox and 1×1 Gallery, Singapore; In you is the Illusion of Each Day, curated by Maya Kovskaya in Latitude 28 [2011]; Aicon Gallery, London [2010]. He has also shown at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Leila Heller Gallery, New York; Gallery Espace, Delhi to name a few. His public art projects include the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport Commission, Mumbai [2013] and the Indira Gandhi International Airport Commission, New Delhi [2011]. He has been the recipient of the Harmony Art Foundation Emerging Artist award of the Year, 2008. The Devi Art Foundation, the R.P.G Collection, Harmony Art Foundation, Uttrayan Foundation, Patrons of Tel Aviv Museum, the Gwangju Museum of Art and several other private and public enterprises have collected his work.

The artist lives and works in Baroda.

Chitra Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality and power, absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, charcoal drawings, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms. Ganesh’s studies in literature, semiotics, and social theory have been critical to a steady engagement with narrative and deconstruction that animates her work. Her vocabulary draws from Surrealism, Expressionism, Hindu and Buddhist iconography, and South-Asian pictorial forms such as Kalighat and Madhubani painting, connecting these with contemporary mass-mediated visual languages of comics, science, fiction, news, photography, and illustration.

Chitra Ganesh’s works have been shown in many prominent galleries and museums which include Gallery Espace, New Delhi; CSMVS, Mumbai; Museum of Contemporay Art, Shanghai; Saatchi Gallery, London; Nature Morte, Berlin; Gotenburg Kunsthalle, Sweden; Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh and Queens Museum of Art, New York to name a few. Her work is also part of many collections like the Burger Collection, Brooklyn Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The artist lives and works in New York.