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.

Chintan Upadhyay is known for creating provocative and incisive works that critique society in a decidedly tongue-in-cheek fashion. His signature leitmotif – babies (Chintus/Smart Alecs/Designer Babies) – functions both as symbol and surface on which meaning is created following their idiosyncratic requirements. In their homogeneity and vaguely disturbing artificiality, they highlight the rampant commercialism we see around us. Often overtly sexual Shekhawat Miniatures appear on the body of the work, suggestive of the contradictions within the artist’s own mind and practice.

In this manner his paintings and fibreglass sculptures represent cultural fusion and a metamorphosis of classicism into the contemporary. In their assorted irreverent poses and gestures, they interrogate manipulated realities and the politics of identity with impish anger hidden beneath a cute exterior. In addressing serious issues of genetic manipulation and mutation, Chintan Upadhyay problematizes not only identity, consumerism and cultural formation but the very nature of life, birth and death in a technologically modern world brutally dictated by market forces. Chintan Upadhyay has shown in several galleries around the world including Gallery Espace, New Delhi; Leela Kempinski Art Gallery, Mumbai; Seoul Art Centre, South Korea and Grosvenor Gallery, London. He is a recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust award and several other awards for his paintings and drawings. He also founded Sandarbh, an artists’ initiative that provides impetus and a creative environment for artists from around the globe.

Born in 1943 Amit Ambalal uses his satirical wit to develop parody, caricature and mimicry in his work. The pleasure he derives by a moving brush is evident in his act of image-making, defined by the free flow and transparency of colour and form.

In 1979 he decided to abandon the role of a businessman and become an artist. His keenness to be transparent and therefore very human have led him to banish rigidity and embrace fluidity in his life. His work becomes as much about birds and animals as about human beings in satirical arrangements. Imbued with energy and wit, Ambalal creates a visual language, where he often re-explores mythological themes and tales, and re-imagines mythical characters in  new idioms, both secular and sacred. He works in watercolour, gouache, dry pastels and papier mache. Amit Ambalal has exhibited at Gallery Espace, New Delhi; Archer Art Gallery, Ahmedabad, Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata; Bodhi Art, Singapore; Galerie F.I.A., Amsterdam; James Harvey Gallery, Sydney amongst many others. He is the recipient of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, Italy [2003], Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation [1974] and Gujarat State Lalit Kala Akademi [1968]. He has also participated in the India Art Fair, New Delhi [2010], 6^th Bharat Bhavan Biennale of Contemporary Indian Art, Bhopal [1996]. Ambalal’s interest in Nathdwara Paintings of Rajasthan led him to publish a seminal book entitled Krishna as Shrinathji. He also held an exhibition of his personal collection of Nathdwara Paintings in Delhi.

The artist lives and works in Ahmedabad.