Artist Based in India
Shruti Maheshwari
My practice moves between the body and the natural world, treating both as archives of memory — what they carry, what they remember, what endures. Working primarily in oil on canvas, with an extended practice in charcoal and mixed media, I translate lived experience into visual form: the politics of the female body, the weight of inherited silence, the quiet persistence of things that outlast us.
My formation has been self-directed across two decades, and deepened since 2025 through studio mentorship at Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi.
EXPLORATION : THE BODY AND POWER
All that we Hold
Oil on Canvas, 20 inches by 16 inches
Centering the hands as primary agents of lived experience, this work proposes the body as an archive of memory, grief, and tenderness. The gesture — hands resting at the heart — is at once universal and deeply private, collapsing the distance between viewer and image.
Bandishein
Oil on Canvas, 20 Inches by 16 inches
Exploring surrender and support as twin forces rather than opposites, Bandishein stages a visual argument for the invisible architecture of human connection. The floating figure, held aloft by a constellation of golden hands, speaks to the ways we are simultaneously bound and sustained by those who reach toward us
A Flight anticipated
Oil on Canvas, 36 inches by 24 inches
This piece conceptualizes life as an exciting maze filled with unknown turns and endless possibilities. Anchored in the shadows, the winged figure embodies a profound state of suspended potential—a quiet incubation and gathering of agency, poised to navigate the complexity above and ascend toward illumination.
Meat Shop
Oil on Canvas paper, 11 inches by 8 inches
This piece renders fragmented female forms as commodified flesh in a butcher shop display. By anchoring the visual perspective from the inside looking out, it transforms the act of observation into an uncomfortable trap of complicity
Vagina Chakra
Acrylic on Paper, 14 inches by 10 inches
Rooted in the Shakti tradition while speaking to contemporary feminist discourse, Vagina Chakra refuses the subordination of feminine creative force to the decorative or the spiritual. The central figure is not a goddess at rest — she is a generator at full capacity.
Do you see it?
Acrylic, Graphite on paper, 11 inches by 8 inches
A self-portrait ringed by handwritten text — “silence is fatal,” “silence is permissive,” “I speak, I die, I don’t speak, I’m already dead.” The figure at the centre looks out steadily, almost with challenge. This is a painting about the cost of perspective: what it takes to hold your own, to insist on being seen, to speak when the frame around you insists on your silence.
The Head that wears the Crown
Charcoal pencil on Paper, 11 inches by 8 inches
This charcoal study portrays a woman — sovereign in bearing, burdened in expression — as a meditation on the price of power. Rather than celebrating the crown, the work interrogates it: the weight it confers, the sacrifice it demands, and the particular complexity of female authority
EXPLORATION: NATURE AS ARCHIVE
Tree of Faith
Oil on Canvas, 16 Inches by 11 inches
Tree of Faith figures the ancient tree as a site of convergence — between generations, between the visible and the supernatural, between the individual and the collective. It is a painting about the stories we tell to make sense of continuity, and the things that outlast the telling.
Night Blooms
Oil on Canvas, 16 inches by 11 inches
Night Blooms inverts the hierarchy of scale — the nocturnal flora overwhelms the human world, which retreats to a single illuminated window. It is a painting about what flourishes when we stop watching.
Sunrise in Kumaon
Oil on Canvas, 20 inches by 16 inches
There are mornings in the Kumaon hills when the sun does not simply rise — it arrives. This painting is an attempt to hold that moment: light not as illumination but as force, pouring down the mountain in rays so physical they seem to reshape the land beneath them.
Painted with impasto at the sun's core — the paint built up until it catches its own light — and looser, more urgent strokes radiating outward, the work enacts what it depicts. The grasses in the foreground, dry and ordinary, are transformed by the same light that strikes the peaks. Nothing escapes it. Nothing is meant to.
A painting about the moments that insist on being remembered — not because we chose them, but because they chose us.
Fossilised Lillypad
Oil on Canvas, 36 inches by 24 inches
Reimagining a common lilypad as a textured, fossilized relic, this piece explores the profound impermanence of the natural world. By transforming an everyday organic form into an ancient artifact, the artwork invites a quiet reflection on time—proposing a distant era where the deeply familiar elements of our current environment might only exist as memory.
The impasto surface mimics the calcified weight of the subject, making the medium and the meaning inseparable
Fractals
Oil on Canvas, 12 inches by 12 inches
Drawing on the mathematical sublime of fractal geometry as it manifests in organic form, this series proposes that nature's most rigorous structures are also its most beautiful. The works invite the viewer to move between the microscopic and the infinite without ever leaving the surface of a single canvas
EXPLORATION : MEMORY & PLACE
Shadows Of Antiquity
Oil on Canvas, 20 inches by 16 inches
Painted from life in the Palace of Charles V, Alhambra, Shadows of Antiquity uses the geometry of imperial architecture as a meditation on power's residue. The vast, emptied courtyard — shadow-swept, geometrically absolute — poses the question of what endures when the human noise of history falls quiet.
Season of Mangoes
Oil on Canvas, 16 Inches by 11 inches
Capturing the vibrant, inviting essence of a freshly plucked harvest, this piece celebrates the mango as the quintessential delight of an Indian summer. The overflowing basket acts as a vessel for deep nostalgia, evoking warm memories of extended families gathering to share the fruit directly from the tree. It beautifully preserves the sensory joy of these shared moments—the messy hands, the lively chit-chat, and the golden sweetness of a lingering summer afternoon.
Mandala
Acrylic on paper, 11 inches by 8 inches
Mandala is a meditation on ornamental syncretism — the ways cultural motifs migrate, hybridize, and find new meaning across time. The serpentine forms and dermal textures propose the decorative as a site of deep cultural memory, not mere pattern.
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