Interior Terrains
Anushree Rabadia | Maitreyi Desai
There is a certain sense of attention that abstraction demands ,a more reflective and cerebral engagement with how a mark is made, how the texture and surface holds light, and how a line can bear the weight of an action. The practices of Anushree Rabadia and Maitreyi Desai are rooted in this kind of distilling of experience. They explore the fundamentals of line and form, choosing abstraction as a means of articulation. Honing the potency of the line, they channel everyday experiences through simplicity as a form of focus.
“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.” (Rilke, R.M. Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Eight (1904).
Both artists locate value in the ordinary, overlooked things — the bark of a tree, the reflection of light on water, a brief moment of stillness. Staying close to nature is more than just going outdoors for them. It is about maintaining the natural rhythm of things that is unhurried, coexisting, transforming and patient. They adopt a quality of presence, where their practice is guided by intuition and feeling. While both artists find inspiration in nature and everyday experiences, their visual languages employ different techniques.
Maitreyi Desai expands the potential of lines with ink on paper, deeply drawn to geographical terrains and forms in the natural world. Growing up, she anchored a sense of familiarity and home to the natural world around her. A banyan tree at her elementary school became something close to a landmark of the self. When she arrived at college, it was a sprawling banyan tree again that met her, as if it stood there specially to comfort her.
She prefers drawing as an approachable medium to translate and simplify her vision with the texture and intimacy that she discovers through her work. “I perceive the outside world in outlines, alignments, those bold lines that define its outer form, followed by texture and then colour,” describes Maitreyi. She thrives in the neat, patient, and meditative act of drawing lines. As she inscribes precise lines, she traces patterns charged with the ability of lines to shift, flow and adapt. Two drawn lines will almost always differ in pressure, intensity and thickness, giving the work its sense of movement. The work that appears highly formal is dense with a sense of delicacy, fluidity and balance.
On the other hand, Anushree Rabadia’s practice is material in a different register. She has developed a distinctive technique of making tactile compositions with mount board, gridded to make dynamic compositions that become sites of textural play and meaning making. Her works appear geometric at once but are sensitive reflections of the world around her.
Her inclination towards relief work was intuitive, shaped in part by observing her father Jayanti Rabadia, who works across multiple mediums including reliefs in bronze and ceramics. She found her material language through mount board, investigating how forms moved with light, how textures emerge from the surface, and how depth can be created within the pictorial plane without creating an illusion. “The relief aspect is very important—it allows the work to exist between painting and object. The shadows it creates are soft, playful and constantly shifting, depending on the light and the viewer’s position. This subtle play of light and shadow becomes a language in itself. It is sensitive and slow, much like the emotions I try to hold in the work,” explains Anushree.
Her recent works extend this formal language into more conceptual and emotional territory. While they maintain the geometric logic, there is an undertow of feeling affected by the tensions around the globe. The result is works that are calculated, vulnerable and felt.
Both artists have built bodies of work that position abstraction as one of the most direct means of engaging with nature. They share an affinity for earthy, muted tones, a palette of the natural world. Their practice has also been the structure, a daily commitment to material and process that provided grounding in the development of their voice. Both dodge direct representation, moving within the registers of introspection and sensory experience where a line is never just a line, and a shadow is never merely an absence of light.