For centuries, art has served as a medium for narrative storytelling and meaning-making.

However, the onset of the 20th century witnessed a paradigm shift, with contemporary art forging a new path toward an expanded definition while redefining its very essence. The emergence of movements like Cubism, Dadaism and Abstraction irrevocably altered the global understanding of what constitutes as art.

Abstraction has been a central theme within modern art, as it afforded the artists a new sense of liberation from the constraints of representational narratives through form, colours and texture. Over time, abstraction has evolved through myriad global movements like Indian modernism while adapting its form to distinct social, political, and cultural contexts. This exhibition gathers the work of contemporary South Asian artists who continue to expand the idea of abstraction. While rooted in traditional forms like painting, printmaking, and photography, these artists also challenge these media by integrating digital technologies, performative processes, and material experimentation into their practices.

Abstract Encounters features artists working with such as Kishor Shinde, who draws on the layered geometries of Delhi’s urban chaos, transforming dense cityscapes into fragmented visual rhythms. Pradip Rakshit channels natural mysticism, evoking intangible energies through his scenic landscapes. Sheena Bajaria explores the aesthetics of mark-making, pushing the visual language of the brushstroke into playful and meditative scapes.

Natasha Singh uses artificial intelligence to translate yoga movements into generative patterns, embedding physical motion into etched surfaces and sculptural forms. Debasish Mukherjee combines digital printing, cyanotype, and embroidery to reflect on cultural erasure and the fraying of heritage in India’s rapidly urbanizing cities. Manir Mrittik uses cyanotype and photography to explore the delicate and often blurred boundaries between humanity and the natural world.

Abstract Encounters is an invitation to view these works beyond meaning and through introspection and experience. This exhibition offers a space to consider abstraction not only as an aesthetic strategy but as a living, evolving practice, deeply informed by memory, place, body, and technology.

Debasish Mukherjee 

Debasish Mukherjee (b. 1973) was born in Chapra, a historically important town in Bihar. He grew up amidst open spaces and railway colonies, mixing freely with people from various social backgrounds. He graduated from the Banaras Hindu University with a specialization in Painting. Rooted in India, Mukherjee manifests his keen observations of India’s built environment, social fabric and events from his day-to-day life into his art practice. Mukherjee’s work tends to interrogate the way an object or memory is preserved, celebrated or neglected. 

He has also conducted extensive research with weavers and artisans across India, especially within Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Odisha and Gujarat. He has had solo exhibitions including Whispering Lanes at Akar Prakar, Delhi (2023); River Song, at Akar Prakar, New Delhi (2019) and Museum Within at Akar Prakar, New Delhi (2016). He has also participated in numerous group shows including The Legacy of Loss: Perspective on the Partition of Bengal at Kolkata Centre for Creativity (2021); Multitudes & Assemblages for Hub India at Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, Turin, Italy (2022); Inner Life of Things: Around Anatomies and Armatures curated by Roobina Karode at Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Noida 2022); Partition of India…1947 at National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi (2022); Freedom and Awakening at The Alipore Museum with Kolkata Centre for Creativity (2023) and the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale at Red Fort, New Delhi (2023) to name a few. His works are in permanent collections such as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and The Partition Museum, Delhi. The artist lives and works in New Delhi.

Kishor Shinde

Kishor Shinde is a Delhi-based painter whose abstract canvases and paper collages take inspiration from the bustling, chaotic cityscape he lives surrounded by in Delhi. The metropolis appears in his works as a mass of irregularly-shaped colour patches. They bring to mind aerial views of the city, distinguishing features simplified into geometry, with large blocks of colour evoking plots or buildings, ringed or bisected by strips in a contrasting hue that could be streets, all jumbled together, disordered, organic, in a state of flux – like metropolises everywhere in the world.

Shinde completed a diploma in painting from the MS University, Vadodara in 1981, and has had several solo shows – in Delhi at Triveni Kala Sangam (1990 and 1996), Art Inc (1999) and Mint Gallery (2008), and in Mumbai, at Sakshi Gallery (2004 and 2006). He participated in the Tenth Trienniale-India (2001), Second Beijing Biennale (2005), Fourth Beijing Biennale (2010), and the 2012 Bangladesh Art Biennale. He has participated regularly in group exhibitions across India since 1980, most recently in “Inner Life of Things: Around Anatomies and Armatures” (2022) curated by Roobina Karode the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and “Spatial” (2023) at Art Motif.

Shinde received the state Lalit Kala award in 1978 and the Lalit Kala Akademi Award for Painting in 1998. Shinde was also a recipient of the Harmony Art Foundation residency in 2007-08. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, and in several private collections.

Shinde lives and works in New Delhi.

Manir Mrittik

Manir Mrittik’s (b.1975) works across a range of media and techniques such as photography, weaving, drawing, painting and technologies drawn to software and gaming. He formulates original propositions through an idiosyncratic approach to photography, where the printed image is augmented by various interventions. Mrittik’s oeuvre investigates personal memory, accepted histories and our relationship to temporality. It explores the dialectical experience of the self vis-à-vis dominant narratives such as the Modern postulate of universal art history. Mrittik’s self-portraits and tableaux vivants are ambivalent: they stage imagined drama where the artist constantly traces new relations between his personal life, the hierarchies of the artistic tradition and the materiality of the world he lives in. 

Manir completed his Master’s from the University of Chittagong, Bangladesh. He has had multiple solo and group exhibitions including the Dhaka Art Summit, 2014; Chobi Mela VIII, organized by Drik, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 2015; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York,2016; Contours: Practices from Beyond the Border at Akar Prakar, New Delhi, 2023; Its Personal at Akar Prakar, New Delhi, 2023 and Bare Liminal at Akar Prakar, Kolkata, 2024. In India, he had his first solo exhibition, “In The Realm of Ambivalence” at Akar Prakar, New Delhi in 2018. The artist works and lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Natasha Singh

Born in 1988 in Jiroft, Iran, Natasha Singh is an interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges ancient Indian art practices with contemporary creative technologies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Product Design from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Hyderabad, and a Master’s degree in Communication Design from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Singh’s practice explores the relationship between rhythm, pattern, and the human body, often employing computer vision and cameras to create generative sculptures inspired by yoga. Her award-winning studio, Timeblur Studio, operates at the intersection of art and technology.

Most recently Natasha works were exhibited at Vida Heydari Contemporary, Pune in 2024, Delhi Contemporary Art Week in 2023, Art Mumbai 2023, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts in 2023, and the Indian Art, Architecture and Design Biennale in Delhi, 2023. Singh has also spoken at notable platforms such as Eye Myth Festival, Future Conference 2024, and TEDx.

Natasha Singh lives and practices in Gurgaon, India.

Pradip Rakshit

Born in Assam in 1954, Pradip Rakshit graduated from the Indian College of Art, Calcutta. He is a nature mystic and believes in delineating the poetry that is dormant within landscapes and the environment. In the contemporary Indian art scene, Pradip Rakshit is considered among the eminent painters of this time. His abstracts landscapes are a melange of deep rooted mysticism and poetry. His colours get effortlessly soaked in the shape of his works. A deep contemplation gets reflected in his canvases and he is ever driven towards an even deeper cogitation. There’s a subtle nuance in each of his works that intensifies as the colours and shapes communicate with each other. Viewers have often described their experience of standing in front of his canvases as a meditative process, which only grows with time until they are compelled to give themselves up completely to the painting.

Over the past 36 years, Pradip’s works have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions in India and abroad and are part of many private collections.

The artist lives and works in Kolkata.

Sheena Bajaria

Born in Vadodara, India, Sheena Bajaria completed her BFA from Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore, 2017. She works in acrylic paints, spray, soft pastel and uses sticks, sponges, and rocks to create impressions. Her works are a collage of impasto doodles, dots, scribbles, scratches and occasional biomorphic forms that float on an atmospheric background. The mark making system allows her to explore the subject of visibility; appearance and recognition. Painting to her is a way of extracting the essential features of what we experience, where the invisible becomes visible. The marks in her painting provide her with clues on how embodied subjects inhabit space. The establishment and recognition of one form from another lead to inquiry beyond the physical reality. She aspires to make a connection between the significance of making a painting and the aesthetic form.

Her works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally in galleries and institutions including Space Studio, Baroda; 079 Stories, Ahmedabad; Project 118, Mumbai; Cultivate Art, Mumbai and Lasalle College of the Arts Singapore. She was also an artist in residence at Space Studio, Baroda in 2021.

The artist is based between Vadodara and Singapore.