Tanya Goel’s works are notable for their exploration of a rigorous abstraction that is deeply invested in the process of their creation. The artist makes her own pigments from a diverse array of materials including charcoal, aluminum, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite, and foils, many sourced from sites of architectural demolitions in and around New Delhi. She is interested in the textures of her pigments as well as their colors, which is a direct result of how they reflect light. Her compositions, noted for their density and complexity, are mathematical formulas which are established and then violated, resulting in a balance between structure and chaos. Goel’s paintings can also be read as linguistic systems, as meaning is constructed only through laborious repetition.

The artist is interested in the idea of the Screen, which painting has always been analogous with. We can trace the Screen through the trajectory of Art History from the flatness of Egyptian art to the simulated three-dimensional space of the Renaissance, back to the flatness of Modernist Abstraction. Goel’s works elaborate a dialogue for painting acknowledging the digital screens in which most of our information and images now reside, exploring both the limitations and the freedoms to be found within this flux.

Tanya Goel was born in New Delhi in 1985 and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, before completing her Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Yale University in 2010. She has had two solo shows with Nature Morte (New Delhi in 2018 and New York in 2019), two with Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai (2011 and 2015), recently with the Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco (2023). In 2022, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels mounted a survey of her works from the past 15 years. Her works are in the collections of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada; the UBS Bank, Zurich; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art ; Louis Vuitton Collection, Paris; and The Lalbhai Museum in Ahmedabad. She was a participating artist in both the Sydney and Gwangju Biennales in 2018. A site-specific work entitled ‘index V’ was on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2020, as a part of the exhibition ‘fault lines,’ curated by Amanda Sroka.

Aditya Pande

Thukral & Tagra, 2023