The exhibition ‘Sands of Time’ by artist Rashmi Khurana is a body of work that stands on the edge of painterly abstraction, blurring boundaries between painting, making, cleansing and healing

Artist Rashmi Khurana’s recent body of work started taking shape when she spent time cleaning her house and de-cluttering her studio after her previous solo show. The urge to remove and to create was co-existing within her as she went through hours of tearing, scrubbing, washing, trying to create space in her studio and in her head.

This led to ‘Sands of Time’ — a body of work that stands on the edge of painterly abstraction, blurring boundaries between painting, making, cleansing and healing. It embodies the time spent in her studio, the physicality of the hours, the internal struggles for a new language, the residues of an older body of work — like dried paint, torn paper and canvases.

Over the years, Khurana has grown to be sensitive to the ‘everyday aesthetics’, and possibilities of beauty in the environment. This ability to see the beauty in torn pieces of paper, in scraped up piles of dried paint, in a bundle of rope found somewhere in the studio is reflected in her works and forms the essence of this show.

Painting for many years, she experiments with not just art but also with the tapestry and the canvas. Using papier mache canvas for her works, she creates a different texture and feel, a depth that enhances the vision and eye relationship while looking at her paintings. The organic forms of paper pulp almost add a sculpture-like quality to the work transforming it into a spatial element.

The process was long and time-consuming but Khurana felt a sense of completion as the paintings for the exhibition were ready. “My studio was filled with piles of paper, jars of mache, paints, canvases, paintings and work in progress. But as the paintings started finishing and the studio started clearing out, it gave me a sense of completion and clarity. My mind cleared out with my studio and my soul felt complete,” she says.

Her engaging works follow the style of abstract and has the ability to bring joy and pain onto the same plane co-existing not in a quiet harmonious way, but in deep conversations with each other.

“My way of practising art is abstract, as it gives me complete freedom of formulation and expression. Through the process of painting, I want to explore and discover an unfettered expression guided by the tenants of intuition and experimentation, as if liberating my imagination to produce illogical and startling elements,” Khurana adds.

The exhibition is on display at Art Konsult Gallery till January 12