Nature Morte is pleased to present the first monographic exhibition in India by London-based artist Raghav Babbar entitled Mela/मेला.

Held every 12 years, the Kumbh Mela is the world’s largest gathering and for some, like India-born artist Raghav Babbar, 2025 provided the first opportunity for him to visit. This expansive series of paintings draws not only from his experiences visiting the Kumbh but also his witness of and participation in profound acts of humility, strengthening personal agency, and further grounding in spiritual beliefs. While the project began prior to this year, as Babbar’s practice is centered on portraiture as a form of social revelation, the works are especially poignant for their disclosure of physicality and deep emotion as evinced by the individuals presented in each painting. For Babbar, to visit the Kumbh with his parents was also a journey home. Not only to India, but also to spaces and peoples that, for the artist, continue to conjure memory and joy, trauma, and beauty. While understood loosely as a series, the paintings seen together represent individual narratives that are centered on ideas of becoming, of continuity, of resonance across temporalities. The works are not about the Kumbh itself but of humanity, of a collective sharing and generosity that are guided by systems that today are eclipsed by external forces. These works ask: How do we see one another? What and how are we seen? What and who do we forget?

Built up over time as a series of layers, each painting privileges emotion, the body and activates a push-pull for the viewer that engages one with varied forms of proximity, knowledge, and care. With each work, the viewer is cast into the same, yet sometimes not shared, spaces of the sitter or subject. Such intense proximity allows for a range of feelings, as recorded by Babbar and communicated by paint, to slowly emerge from the canvas. They are at once about the countenance or expression of the individual but also about an action that is about to take place or has just been completed. There are moments of fragility, of searching, of looking beyond. Caught in and of time, the subjects chosen for the works are at once embodiments of specific emotions yet also can symbolize a people, a place, even a time. For the larger works presented in this exhibition, we are also drawn into scenarios that at once evoke precise moments at the Kumbh, yet because Babbar chooses to diminish contextual scenery or placement, the figures are simultaneously foreground and background. This compression allows for the paintings to yield truths that are not immediately evident but unfold over time.

About the Artist

Raghav Babbar (b.1998) was born in Rohtak, near Delhi, and was influenced at a young age by travels through Uttarakhand and Sikkim. He studied at Lasalle College of Art in Singapore and participated in his first international group exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore in 2019. Babbar began his MFA studies in painting at the Royal College of Art in 2022. Since 2021, Raghav has had solo exhibitions in London, Venice, Singapore and Stockholm and selected group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Miami, and New Delhi. Raghav Babbar’s longstanding interest in portraiture elevates a unique visual and spatial language for storytelling that harnesses a range of emotions and contexts found in the everyday, the overlooked, and those rituals that sustain India and South Asian society.

Raghav resides and works in London. This is his first solo exhibition with Nature Morte and in India.