Nature Morte is pleased to present a solo exhibition of paintings by Vandana Kothari. Kothari's road to painting has been long and circuitous, having studied in Santiniketan, resided in Baroda and Kanpur, before coming to Delhi. Similarly, the trajectory of her practice has meandered through her own exploration of international art and the complexities of Art History. Her technique has been developed as a meditative exercise, a repetitive mark-making that was designed to block the outside world from her thoughts. With this, Kothari was able to free her paintings from any outside references, any meanings, any attempts at representations. 

However during the development of this technique, Kothari found herself drifting towards imagery, as the layers of dots she painted began to coalesce and suggest possibilities. Fragmentation itself became her subject matter, as she felt the paintings mirrored how she was feeling about herself and her life, “gelling with my anxiety,” as the artist put it. For Kothari, painting is inherently a contradiction and with these works she hopes to both expose and explore these contradictions. With the works in the exhibition, the hesitant images they portray shift according to the placement of the viewer, becoming more or less readable depending on one’s distance from the canvas. Illusion is at the very heart of these works, standing ground on the slippery slope between abstraction and representation, the viewer herself choosing the direction in which to proceed from this liminal point. Kothari sees her works as elucidating one of life’s fundamental principles: while everything may appear to be different on the surface, it is actually all the same underneath.  

Vandana Kothari (b. Rajasthan, 1978) is based today in the New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts degree in 1999 from the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur and her Masters of Fine Arts degree in 2002 from the Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions including at the Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, the Birla Academy, Kolkata, the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, and the Hutheesing Visual Art Centre, Ahmedabad. Since 2014 she has been an Assistant Professor of Art at the School of Planning & Architecture in New Delhi.