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For astir 3 decades, Pune-based creator Neena Singh led parallel lives. One followed the operation and subject of a civilian servant, portion the different unfolded done colour and texture. It was lone successful her precocious 30s that she began coating seriously, teaching herself to construe her feelings into form. What began arsenic a idiosyncratic refuge has since grown into a profoundly intuitive creator practice, 1 that balances reflection with expression.
This idiosyncratic travel present finds look successful her latest exhibition, Echoes of Becoming, astatine Delhi’s Bikaner House — her archetypal solo successful the capital. The amusement brings unneurotic 50 works connected canvas and paper, each executed successful acrylic, created implicit the past 5 years and charting her way of renewal. Curated by artists Aditya Shirke and Rahul Kumar, the accumulation unfolds similar an intimate diary of transformation. Each canvas captures moments of emergence and dissolution, arsenic if the creator herself were caught mid-thought, mid-breath, and mid-becoming.
“I came to creation due to the fact that I was exhausted with my thoughts,” Neena shares. “Words were inadequate, which is wherefore coating became a channel.” Her abstractions gully from Nature, not arsenic literal landscapes but arsenic affectional states: the travel of water, the restlessness of wind, oregon the warmth of light. “Anything from Nature oregon the scenery serves arsenic a constituent of departure,” she says. “It’s not astir depicting, it’s astir expanding that thought.”
Nature, intuition and the connection of colour
Neena’s travel arsenic a nonrecreational creator began successful 2006 with a solo accumulation Serendipity astatine Mumbai’s iconic Jehangir Art Gallery. Though self-taught, her intelligence curiosity has ever shaped her practice. She holds a Master’s and MPhil successful Sociology and earned her Doctor of Philosophy from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, wherever her probe focussed connected linguistic individuality and Indian nationalism.
This engagement with ideas of belonging, and look continues to pass her art, giving her abstractions a consciousness of meaning that feels some intimate and universal. For Neena, Nature is ne'er specified scenery; it is simply a authorities of being. The canvases successful Echoes of Becoming bespeak this sensibility: brushed gradations of blue, gentle golds, and earthy ochres evoke moods much than objects.
While galore works shimmer successful these bright, expansive tones, determination are immoderate pieces from 2023-2024 successful greys and blacks, revealing interior turmoil and introspection. Certain paintings from 2020 adjacent transportation a photographic quality, capturing fleeting ocular impressions with an immediacy that contrasts with her much lyrical abstractions. Yet each of her paintings stock an affectional transparency.
“There’s a consciousness of unpretentiousness successful her work,” notes Aditya. “ The champion benignant of creation is unfastened to interpretation, wherever the spectator brings their ain meaning.”
Her process follows a bushed of emergence and erasure. She seldom begins with sketches oregon plans; instead, she approaches a blank aboveground instinctively, placing marks, splashes, and strokes until thing begins to breathe. “It’s a process of gathering and destroying,” she explains. “Each furniture carries some instauration and dissolution.”
Neena’s abstractions recall, successful spirit, the atmospheric canvases of Turner and the contemplative silences of Gaitonde. The influences of SH Raza’s vibrant geometry and Gaitonde’s meditative restraint are besides evident, not arsenic imitation but arsenic inheritance. “I beryllium galore debts to these masters,” Neena reflects. “Their tone lingers successful however I attack colour and stillness.”
Freedom done becoming Her originative dependable is profoundly intertwined with her beingness story. Growing up successful tiny towns crossed North India, successful a clip and household wherever a woman’s choices were often constrained, Neena archetypal discovered state successful the pages of books, and later, successful the enactment of painting. “Painting was however I broke distant from boundaries that felt unfair,” she reflects. “It gave maine abstraction to breathe.”
Echoes of Becoming is simply a meditation connected what it means to beryllium successful moments that are ne'er fixed but ever successful flux. Neena’s paintings dwell successful the spaces betwixt thought and feeling, capturing the quiescent hostility of moments successful motion. In them, state is not an abstract thought but a lived acquisition — fragile, luminous, and ever-renewing.
The accumulation is connected until November 17 11am to 7pm astatine Main Art Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi
