Nature Morte is pleased to present "Polyphony" an exhibition of works by New York-based Indian artist Sagarika Sundaram. This is the artist's first solo show in India and only her second solo show to date, having premiered her works at the Palo Gallery in New York in 2023. A major work commissioned for the UBS Lounge was just displayed at Art Basel Miami Beach in December. Her next solo show is scheduled for the Alison Jacques Gallery in London in October 2025.

The title of the exhibition refers to the artist's interest in the connections between music and abstraction. Sagarika's approach to constructing her works and her use of color in them are both intuitive and improvisatory, resulting in works that ebb and flow over time, much like a piece of music.

While she works with a range of textiles, Sagarika's primary material is felt, which she makes by hand and dyes herself. The dynamic process, during which rolls of raw wool fiber are transformed into monumental sculptures in the hands of the artist, is almost theatrical. After laying the raw material on the ground in the form of a wooly, mesh-like membrane, she uses soap and water to transform it into a single piece of material, building the layers from the backside. The face of the work reveals itself only when she flips it over and she then cuts open the piece to reveal the layers within. Sagarika executes this with surgical precision to expose the unknown and unexpected that result from her labour-intensive process.

The anatomical nature of her works, at times, appear to allude to the hemp sculptures of legendary Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee. Like Mukherjee, Sagarika’s works celebrate the process of birth and growth. Included in her show at the Palo Gallery in New York was the major work entitled "Source." Now in the collection of the Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi, the sculpture, a large-scale three-dimensional circular work suspended from the ceiling, will be the centerpiece of the Nature Morte show. Other wall works of various scales will be included in the exhibition. Sagarika, however, is as curious about the process as she is in the beginnings and the endings of a work. Perhaps, even more so: “There’s a moment at the start where I throw certain colours down, or throw fiber down with an energy that guides the way the rest of the composition unfolds. But I never really know what the final composition is going to look like until layers are open and interact with each other,” says the artist. The works participate equally in the histories of both abstract painting and sculpture.

Also featured in the show will be four new wall pieces made in glass mosaics, a new medium for the artist, which have patterns akin to the batik technique, popular in outSh-East Asia. Sagarika’s relationship to Batik goes back to her days studying at the Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, where her professors, many of whom were from Shantiniketan, taught her the wax resist cloth painting technique. Her backwards approach to creating the felt works, in fact, has its origins in her training in batik, “where the image slowly appears in reverse”.

Sagarika Sundaram was born in Kolkata in 1986 into a Tamil family and spent much of her childhood in Dubai. She graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons/The New School in New York in 2020. Previously she also studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She lives and works in New York City and her works have been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Art, NY; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, Boiceville NY; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX; British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK; the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Salon 94, New York. Nature Morte has featured her work at the Armory Show in New York in 2022, '23 and '24 and at the Frieze London fair in 2023.