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For the 2025 edition of Art Mumbai, Art Musings will be showcasing works especially created for the Fair, by artists with whom the gallery shares a long relationship. Each artist has blazed their own path of experimentation, exploration and discovery, and the works on display will address concepts that have animated their practice. The booth will feature Indian masters SH Raza, Sakti Burman, Anjolie Ela Menon and Satish Gujral; French artist Maïté Delteil; as well as contemporary artists Nalini Malani, T Vaikuntam, Jayasri Burman, Baiju Parthan, Maya Burman, Nilofer Suleman, Gopikrishna,  and Shilo Shiv Suleman.

SH Raza works on display include a black Bindu Nad painting, a concept that has been a focal point in the artist’s journey; along with a trio of drawings. Sakti Burman’s painting ‘The Divine Child’, creates a world of fantasy, fable and poetic harmony. Flanked by earlier works of his early marble series, one can see the storytelling narrative that has been constant through the years. An early work by Satish Gujral is a display as well as Anjolie Ela Menon’s portraits in her signature style. Maïté Delteil’s exquisite rendition of landscape, ‘Happy Summer’ celebrates life and nature, offset by smaller works of the same theme. One sees the influence of the rich cultural heritage in Jayasri Burman’s work. Her painting ‘Pranan’ has an altar-like quality, and depicts The Sacred Feminine. Fables creep into the narrative, full of myth and magic. A large Nalini Malani panel holds the viewer enthralled with her reverse acrylic work. Baiju Parthan’s canvas ‘The Last Battle of Sigmund Freud’ delves into a tumultuous fusion of metaphysics and psychology, portraying the release of libidinal energies clashing against the vast expanse of the Jungian collective unconscious. Vaikuntam presents a diptych panel in his trademark signature style. Maya Burman showcases various shapes, featuring a slender panel, along with 2 rondos. The paintings are peopled by pneumatic figures, depicted in moments of play and festivity, inspired by her garden in the south of France. Nilofer Suleman’s attention to detail is present in the two portraits in the diptych ‘Gulshan e Iran, where ornate jewellery and intricately patterned outfits adorn her central characters. Items such as spiced boxes, paandaans and flowers complete the composition. Shilo Shiv Suleman fills an entire wall with her recent work ‘Incarnation’, featuring three paintings set inside contemporary brass prabhavallis. The concept looks at the act of a spirit choosing a body, giving thought to the idea of how our spirits somehow find our bodies.

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Art Musings opens their next exhibition on 26^th September 2025 with ‘Intimate Vistas of the Interiors’, a solo show of Nikhil Chaganlal. The exhibition features a capsule collection of only 12 small paintings from the famed interior series by the Goa-based artist. Intimate and personal, the works draw the viewer into the private settings created by Nikhil, drawn from personal memories and experiences.

To quote from the catalogue essay by cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote:

“The interiors that Nikhil Chaganlal evokes in his recent paintings are atmospheres rather than spaces. Cast as memoirs, they capture the flavour of remembered occasions, the texture of half-expressed desires, the fugitive moods that linger in the aftermath of conversation, festivity and the disclosure of self to other. In these frames, the artist fuses the actual with the imagined or symbolic: he merges features that exist, in childhood homes and adult staging-points he has known, with tropes that emblematize styles, periods and idioms of comfort that he cherishes. But where such a subject might have tempted a more flamboyant into a defiantly self-indulgent playing at decadence, Chaganlal brings to his treatment vulnerability that verges on reticence. His gestures, as he invites us into these atmospheres, are those of discreet unveiling rather than flagrant display: his approach is tempered by an awareness that he is about to share a private fantasia with a viewing public, always a fraught encounter. For Chaganlal, the interior is not a spatial description; nor is it simply an immersion in a time-warper’s daydream of elegant living. The interior is a wager on interiority, on an inward retreat that can unquestionably be called home: an ideal zone of belonging where nothing will discomfit or disquiet the resident self, intrude upon its serenity”

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Monsoon Ensemble ’25 brings together works by a group of 16 diverse artists. The varied body of works in a palette of monochrome grays and browns complement each other, drawing from various sources and coming together in a smooth synthesis of disparate styles.

Among the works, are rarely seen paintings by stellar artists. Indian legend Husain’s watercolour draws from pan-Indian mythology; as does a scroll of Jayasri Burman, displaying the abode of the Gods. A dramatic nude by Jogen Chowdhury enthralls with its strong lines.

Gopikrishna, Baiju Parthan and Shibu Natesan explore different mediums. Gopikrishna peoples his universe with myriad creatures and characters in his surrealistic artworks; Shibu’s watercolour works embrace photorealism; and the cityscapes of Baiju Parthan are a combination of 3D graphics and lenticular printing technology. 

The portraiture wall comprises works by Lalu Prasad Shaw, Laxma Goud, Vaikuntam, Suhas Roy and Sunil Padwal.

Bold striking watercolors by Paresh Maity and Samir Mondal echo the passion of the artists.  Paresh presents a rendition of his famed Venice series in a suite of ink works, and the textural watercolours by Samir have vitality and depth.

The aura of science fiction surrounds Ajay Dhandre’s meticulously detailed painting in pencil. Architectural spaces are explored in the abstract works by Krishnendu Porel, a haunting watercolour by Shibu and a sensitive miniature work of Jayashree Chakravarty.

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‘A Touch of Carmine’ features a group of contemporary artists, each with their own unique language. Works on display include some early paintings from the gallery’s permanent collection.

An early artwork from the ‘Absurd Construction’ series by Bose Krishnamachari comprises handmade spiral bound books, which are treated as both material and canvas; burned, torn, cut, and restructured through an instinctive, process-based approach, evolving into an abstract construction on board. The imposing Chittrovanu Mazumdar canvas combines elements of text ‪amid the fierce strokes of swirling abstraction.

A four panel work by Reena Kallat invites the viewer to take a closer look at the detailed and layered storytelling, while Suneel Mamadapur’s surrealist vocabulary combines animal metaphors with contemporary cityscapes.

Paresh Maity presents a suite of angular faces in oil, alongside a large watercolour landscape, showcasing the artist’s strength in both mediums. Sanju Jain continues her exploration with the Tree of Life, in a work replete with flora and fauna.

Prabhakar Kolte, Sujata Bajaj and Shrikant Kadam, each in their distinctive way, have pursued the elusive abstract path. Kolte’s canvases are characterized by a single, dominant color in the background, on which lighter and more complex forms, both geometric and organic, are placed. Sujata’s work combines text fragments from ancient Indic scriptures in blazing vibrant shades of red and ochre, and Kadam presents a series of works in a constant endeavour to extricate colour from its bondage to the content of the painting and award it a dimension of wordless communication.

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To coincide with the Mumbai Gallery Weekend, Art Musings presents a rare treat for art lovers in the city of Mumbai, with ‘Resonance’, an exhibition featuring works of an inter-generational ensemble of artists. The exhibition is a celebration of the completion of the gallery’s 25^th anniversary.

Founded in 1999, Art Musings has enjoyed a long-term relationship of collegiality with stellar practitioners of distinctive approaches, working across generations and choices of medium and vocabulary. In this upcoming exhibition, on display are works by Anjolie Ela Menon, Sakti Burman, Maïté Delteil, Paresh Maity, Jayasri Burman, Baiju Parthan, T. Vaikuntam, Maya Burman, Nilofer Suleman, Smriti Dixit, Gopikrishna, Raghava KK, Nikhil Chaganlal, Sheetal Mallar and Shilo Shiv Suleman.

Timeless concepts are predominant in the works of Anjolie Ela Menon, Sakti Burman and Paresh Maity. Whereas Anjolie explores the mother and child series, Sakti revisits the cosmic churning. Paresh pays tribute to Benares, a city beyond history and time, a source of immense inspiration to him for several years.

Maïté Delteil, Jayasri Burman and Maya Burman pays obeisance to Nature. Jayasri beautifully captures the inherent splendor of nature, unveiling its abundant resources with poetic grace. After Maya’s shift to the idyllic south of France, she has discovered nature, flowers, garden; not only as pictoral elements, but as reality. Maïté Delteil’s Tree of Life stands tall as an ode to Nature.

Works by Baiju Parthan, Gopikrishna and Raghava KK are open-ended, allowing multiple interpretations. Baiju’s work speaks about the arrival of a new world order or the nostalgia for the one that is being erased. It resonates with the artist’s struggle to grasp the world as an event horizon holding multiple sequential realities suspended in a state of superposition. Gopikrishna narrates the first meeting of the natives and the floating continents. Raghava’s work honours women and addresses the impossible contradictions that femininity holds; fierce and fragile, nurturing and untamed, grounded and ethereal.

Nikhil Chaganlal displays achromatic works rendered with black and white tubes of paint on paper, are done in plein air, as he explores the scene or scape of Goa. Sheetal Mallar is drawn to spaces people inhabit and communities they feel a part of. Here she does a docu-photo series on the Kudd dorms, incredible centuries-old spaces that are still in use, in the city of Mumbai.

Memories of earlier experiences of seeing, listening and being, form the crux of the works of Smriti Dixit, Vaikuntam and Nilofer Suleman. Smriti’s works are memory traces, inspired by characters from Kabuli Wala stories. This installation emerges from a full-bodied and sensuous abstraction that extends itself into a sculptural assemblage. Vaikuntam draws on experiences of his land and its people in the family portrait done in his trademark style. Nilofer approaches her painting in the spirit of a storyteller who enjoys nesting one episode inside another, arranging them within circulating cycles of tales. Suleman maps terrains that are shaped by fabular narrative, embroidered travellers’ tales and sensory excitements. In her painting, Manzil e Qaraar, she makes a map of fulfillment, and paints a world where her female protagonist is no longer seeking the beloved but completely content.

Shilo Shiv Suleman’s triptych draws from the ancient traditions of Tantra – seeking the ultimate goal of bringing together our inner and outer worlds. Through this series, Shilo unifies the world of spirit with the world of matter. Through her paintings- Ida, Pingala and Sushumna- she finds sacred center.

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Art Musings opens their next exhibition on 10^th December ’24 with ‘Songs of Rebirth’, a solo show of Nikhil Chaganlal. Chaganlal is showing after a hiatus of 10 years, and this new body of paintings has emerged after his shift to Goa.

To quote from the catalogue essay by art historian and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote:

“Rendered in vivid acrylic on board, Nikhil Chaganlal’s recent paintings are animated by a deep and complex affection for Goa, a feeling that combines penumbral melancholia with resurgent joy. These paintings embody the artist’s profound and decisive shift away from Bombay and Alibaug, where he has spent much of his life, and his reorientation of purpose in Goa, where he has found emotional repose and artistic renewal. Through these pictorial songs of rebirth, Chaganlal processes the implications of this shift in intuitive ways, savouring the freedom offered by his new and nurturing environment while taking account of the dissonances he has left behind.

One can see a passionate regard for Goa’s architecture in its life-affirming diversity, a love of Goa’s unique placeness as articulated through its shapes and structures of habitation and settlement, congregation and worship. Chaganlal testifies to the vitality of Goa’s temples, churches, cathedrals, wayside chapels and guardian deity shrines, not asserted against nature but cradled within its luxuriance of forests, shrubbery, groves and wetlands. Technically, his palette is incandescent with reds, yellows, blues, greens, and oranges. But each of these colours is inflected with shadow. A luminous darkness forms the matrix of these paintings. Resonant songs of rebirth, they gain in depth and gravity by acting as elegies for the former selves that have now been sloughed off and interred in the past.”

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Sakti Burman draws from many sources; Greek and Hindu mythology, Biblical narratives and mediaeval European passion plays, puppet theatre, scroll painting, the Mughal and Rajput miniature ateliers, Kalighat and Bengali popular culture. In the painting and bas-relief on display, Sakti plays with a version of a recurrent subject of his grandson in Ganapathy playing the flute, surrounded by figures culled from his fecund interior universe: a peacock, a flying figure, a figure on a swing.

The painting ‘Utopia’ of Maïté Delteil explores the borderland between memory and fantasy, wakefulness and dream. Her brush conveys the roundedness of cherries, the heavy pile of snow, the variegation of the plumage of hoopoes and finches, the particular serration and generic density of foliage. Delteil’s attentiveness to detail is a form of devotion: her paintings are songs of praise.

Anjolie Ela Menon structures her painting around figures who seem to travel to us from distant milieux: sages, nymphs, saints, nomads. The luminosity of her portraits comes from the patina of diaphanous layers that have glided over the surface. This luminosity is seen in her current painting Pastoral, where Anjolie paints the mother and child from her goatherd series. These are based on people she has seen from her studio in a basti of Nizamuddin, a locality known for its famous shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin and Amir Khusrau.

Jayasri Burman has evolved an iconography that is saturated in the aura of Nature’s nurturing, sustaining, maternal capacities. She invests these capacities in the archetypal figure of the Great Mother, manifested as the Devi, symbolically associated with fertility and plenitude. This is predominant in her recent work on display Padmaja. There is an altar-like quality, depicting Nature as divinity. The imagery in her work has a dream-like and lyrical quality with a unique sensitivity.

Baiju Parthan is an inter-media artist, who shapes his vocabulary from symbols drawn from iconography and alchemy. Scope is about the zone where reasoning has ascended to its utmost to leap into an epiphany. The painting is an adaptation of M.C. Escher’s Penrose steps. Here the artist is presenting the infinite staircase as an object existing in a state of quantum superposition. Bloom is also a reference to the ethno-botanical data that reveals the pivotal role of plant-based entheogens and psychotropic alkaloids in the evolution and development of human cultural and religious realities.

Nilofer Suleman approaches her paintings in the spirit of a storyteller who enjoys nesting one episode inside another, arranging them within framed narratives and larger, circulating cycles of tales. Her protagonists seem to have stepped out of one genre of miniature painting or another. Enter the magical world of Bagh e Wasl, a lover’s garden. There is a kaleidoscopic relay of imagery. In Suleman’s realm of exquisite illusions, jharokhas and chandeliers open onto vistas, and the elements of her architecture are liable to grow wings.                 

Maya Burman two works on display are peopled by pneumatic figures, depicted in moments of play, and festivity, expressive of an abundant joie de vivre or lila, the cosmic spirit of play and creativity. Maya’s characters live in mythology and metaphor. Her figures float through fields, their bodies curving with the shapes of the landscape. The detailing lends a tapestry like effect where everything is subordinate to floral, decorative patterning, reminiscent of the French art nouveau tradition.

Nikhil Chaganlal’s recent paintings are animated by a deep and complex affection for Goa, a feeling that combines penumbral melancholia with resurgent joy. A passionate regard for Goa’s architecture in its life-affirming diversity, a love of Goa’s unique placeness as articulated through its shapes and structures of habitation and settlement, congregation and worship is present in the works. Chaganlal testifies to the vitality of Goa’s temples, churches, cathedrals, wayside chapels and guardian deity shrines, not asserted against nature but cradled within its luxuriance of forests, shrubbery, groves and wetlands.

Smriti Dixit has long been committed to processes of recycling in her art, incorporating fabric, found objects and plastic tags into her works. In the work on display, Kaali, Smriti is influenced by the changes in the landscape brought about by the creepers and moss that grow after a rainfall. This is the creation of a temporary existence of said creepers, destroying the pre-existence of the Mango, Banyan and Sacred Fig trees. It is a reminder of the feminine energy of Kaali who destroys and provides salvation at the same time, is this the blue of Kaali or of Shiva? Of the body or of the rudraksha? Almost as if blue has been washed by blue to get to Kaali. What if one is neither wholly Shiva nor wholly Kaali?

To enter the pictorial world of Gopikrishna is to be plunged into a pageant of extraordinarily animated fables peopled by monsters, chimaeras, sages, pilgrims, warriors and actors. Travel Sketches from the Mountains, a series of three drawings, dwell on the theme of vision beyond the senses. The figures in them have no eyes but they experience the world through their inner eyes. The terrain they exist is suggestive of loneliness. In a rocky country where pleasures of the civilization are absent, the artist is travelling through. And the sketches are the narration of what he experiences in that trip.

Sheetal Mallar is a contemporary Indian photographer. In her work, she has focused on the delicate, unspoken relationships that bind people to places, and on the layers of active and latent signals by which individuals signal their identity and aspirations. In the series on display, Creatures of Passage, Sheetal explores the emotions we experience while watching a film collectively in a cinema hall alongside a stranger in the next seat. She is drawn to the feeling that resonates in these empty spaces addressing the unspoken relationships that bind people to spaces and the relationship we continue to have with them.

Shilo Shiv Suleman is an artist whose work is sustained by commitments to magical realism, poetry, technology and social justice. In the series on display Queen Conch, Shilo references the ancient timeless tales of the archetypal divine feminine. Aphrodite, Venus, Oshun, Lakshmi, Isis, Chalchiuhtlicue, primeval pre-Islamic goddesses and visions of divine feminine appear. She emerges resplendent, bedecked in silk, shell and gold. As with much of Shilo’s work – this is a darshan, a glance and a remembrance of the sacred feminine in all her forms. Queen Conch makes a softer world of gold and shell, and appears as a revelation, and adoration of the oceanic, primordial feminine.

In the open area of the fair, Shilo Shiv Suleman is displaying Shankha, a large scale installation in brass. With ‘Shankha’, Shilo reclaims the sensuality of India’s architectural past, creating a brass sculpture of a cowrie shell that acts as an object of worship. The cowrie shell in India was considered a valuable measure of trade and economic sustenance, a charm worn by the Banjara community to ward off dark spirits, and a symbol of feminine emergence, fertility and from the Samudra Manthan. It represents the theme – India and the world, but also stands as a symbol for an unabashed Sapphic earth feminine.

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Art Musings presents a rare treat for art lovers in the city of Mumbai, with their exhibition ‘Transfigurations’, featuring bas relief sculptures in brass by eminent Indian master Sakti Burman.

Sakti Burman is a pilgrim of complex allegiances. Born in Kolkata in 1935, Burman moved to France in 1959, where he studied, lived and worked until 2019, participating fully in French cultural life; and yet, he emphatically retained his association with India through long-term friendships, continuing professional collaborations, and frequent visits. At the core of his practice is the confluence among cultures, mythologies, periods, and places. Various Indian and European pasts inhabit his art, drawing from mythology, the Mughal miniature ateliers, from Kalighat as well as West European art history and Bengali popular culture.

To quote from the catalogue essay, authored by cultural theorist and art historian Ranjit Hoskote, “Sakti Burman’s recent suite of bas relief sculptures, based on images that have preoccupied him over the decades, reminds us of the tableaux of classical sculpture as featured on the grand doors and elevations of churches, the friezes of public buildings and the exteriors of temple complexes. In a medium that is new to the artist, Burman brings us, again, into the presence of the figures and situations that have fascinated him. Translated or rather transfigured from one medium to another, Sakti Burman’s images breathe a new air, seek our attention afresh. Importantly, these sculptures take the precise form of the fragment, the detail from a larger or lost whole that speaks allusively of that whole. Burman’s sculptural fragments, although complete in themselves, speak to us of the far longer choreography that is his life, his visceral connection to two civilisations and continents, his singular and courageous devotion to the artist’s vocation, which survives all challenges and cataclysms

Art Musings opens Garden; Forest; Meadow, featuring a group exhibition. This monsoon edit is an ode to Nature, as the earth rejuvenates and is flush with exquisite blooms. Tapestries of flowering shrubs and trees full of fruit and flower, celebrate the cycle of nature. The magic and the wisdom of the eternal garden fills the artworks, and transports the viewer into the land of abundance and plenitude. The lineup of artists includes Maïté Delteil, Maya Burman, Shilo Shiv Suleman, Samir Mondal, Rakhee Shenoy, Suneel Mamadapur, Sanju Jain and Nitish Bhattacharjee.

‘Visages’, at Art Musings features a group of established artists including Baiju Parthan, Paresh Maity, Raghava KK, Laxma Goud, Neeraj Goswami, Shibu Natesan, Sunil Padwal. Facial expression presented by an artist is often within a specific context. Its purpose as a visual cue is to trigger thought processes and evoke emotional responses, regardless of the style – abstract, figurative, or non-representational.

Baiju Parthan’s lenticular work ‘Seizure’ made by layering street photography with material gathered from the internet,  explores the moment when an epiphany is triggered by an unexpected event, like an unexpected blow from the Zen master’s walking stick hishaku that can induce a seizure to bring on Satori in meditator. Here the mundane occurrence of a police intervention at a traffic junction is presented as a metaphor for an unexpected event leading to epiphany. In Paresh Maity’s dynamic mixed media painting ‘Golden Gaze’, the angular faces, with their myriad expressions, are closely cropped and juxtaposed with their surroundings. Rendered in a distinctive palette of brown and shadowed yellows, with the interplay of light and shadow, the bold geometric faces stare at you piercingly. Raghava KK’s series ‘Through the Looking Glass’ comprise of a suite of small charcoal portraits of a child. His innate curiosity allows him to explore the myriad possibilities of what can he be next. Laxma Goud, best known for his early drawings that depict eroticism in a rural context, presents early aquatint intaglio & etchings. These interpretations of memories of rural and tribal vivacity through an urban grid, display surreal libidinal tones that mingle fantasy and poetry. The angular geometrical posturing in Neeraj Goswami’s charcoal drawings yield to lyrical moments of repose. Goswami plays with form, breaking them deliberately to bring about a symmetrical geometry of shapes Distortion he eschews and paints figures that are stylised abstracted explorations of the anatomy. In the monochromatic works of Shibu Natesan’s Mastan and Sunil Padwal’s untitled portrait, artistic interpretations remind us of the profound connections and reflections that faces can evoke in our shared human experience. Bold and simple, the works are bereft of any superfluous details, while the layered technique adds a dramatic dimension to the paintings.