Nature Morte is pleased to present Nidhi Agarwal’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, one which displays the artist’s diversification into new materials while also developing a more personalized language.

Known for her aggressive and hyper-chromatic paintings, Nidhi Agarwal’s newest works veer away from pure abstraction to explore figuration, caricature, calligraphy, and vocabulary. What may at first appear to be purely chaos quickly becomes legible and the artist’s choices and control are evident. Agarwal’s canvases are large, imparting a physical, almost performative, sense to the works and as the artist is small in stature, it seems she must wrestle with the images they contain. Faces and figures appear and then fade away, in a ballet in which no single element commands the center of attention. Her paint is thick and viscous, her colors often discordant, her linework a dangerous trap to become ensnared. This is painting which juggles pleasure with pain, beauty with horror.

Along with the paintings will be collage works made predominantly from fabrics which also blend in other found materials. Usually larger than the canvas works, these are more diagrammatic and closer to her drawings in spontaneity. In the center of the room will be a group of sculptures made by the artist in 2017. Simple geometric forms constructed of white paper glow softly by internal lights, their surfaces delicately punctuated by notational drawings which might appear to be scientific or mathematical.

A major part of Agarwal’s practice is drawing on paper and a wide variety of these works, in various sizes, will also be on view. Paint, pastel, crayon, watercolour, and ink are combined to create configurations in which color, line and form are fused into condensed, charged particles. In their polymorphous perversity, Agarwal’s works on paper celebrate the diversity of life on earth and posit no sorts of hierarchies: everything is equal and free, both comical and sinister.

Nidhi Agarwal (b. 1972) is a graduate of the College of Arts, Delhi. She continues to work and live in Delhi. Agarwal’s solo exhibitions have been presented by institutions such as Nature Morte, New Delhi; Artist Center Gallery, Mumbai; and Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi. Her works have also been exhibited at institutions such as Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece; Penza Museum, Penza, Russia; and the Indira Gandhi National Center for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi, India. She has been felicitated with the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant 2016–2017, New York, USA, and has undertaken residencies like the Art PARTage Residency and Workshop, Triangle Network, Mauritius in 2019, and the Draw International Residency, Caylus, France in 2018.