6 Edgy Young Female Artists To Watch Out For In India

The India art scene is bursting with new talent. The annual India Art Fair which was launched in 2008 grew from a few stalls and a couple of 100 visitors to an art extravaganza, hosting over 80,000 visitors in 2015.

Over the past few years art exhibitions, pop-up events, websites which curate art have given many opportunities to upcoming young artists.

Here are 6 young females artists to look out for:

1. Aban Raza

Aban Raza is an artist who has recently also worked as the assistant director for the film M Cream. In an interview for the film’s website she says that for her art works as a ‘proactive tool, to spread awareness and to talk about multiple realities and human existence.'

To me no issue of human existence is too irrelevant – to be neither ignored nor too grand to be glorified. To me human life and its social beauty or violations of it are themes that my art should find artistic ways to express and engage with.

Red Roses in Cupboard : Source Artslant.com

2. Tarini Sethi

Tarini is a fine artist and an illustrator who works primarily with pen and ink. She is interested in exploring the themes of human intimacy and discomfort. In her most recent project, she has asked viewers to send her a photograph of themselves wearing the least amount of clothes possible, along with a few words- these can be sentences, or fragments of thoughts.  In exchange she says, she will draw you, add stuff, delete stuff and provide a representation that is 'jarring' and 'possibly uncomfortable.'  She seeks to break boundaries, and says that what better way to do it than through what we are sometimes most conscious about- our bodies.

Enemy-Friend-Lover with Anwesha Choudhuri, Picture Credit to Tarini Sethi Tumblr

Enemy-Friend-Lover with Nanaki Singh

3. Devika Swarup

Devika Swarup is a Delhi based artist whose art explores the way memory and disappearance are connected.

She works with a variety of materials such as porcelain, wax, glass, metal and stainless steel to create sculptural installations. She is interested in how the physical and cultural connotations of different materials can trigger emotional responses in a viewer.

She has been influenced by the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi Sabi, which suggests that al things are impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete. Everything is in a constant state of becoming and dissolving, she says, and these ideas form the heart of her work.

Prelude, is a performative sculpture that is made of wax and melts during the course of the exhibition. Its form,
keeps changing and transforming into something that is indefinable. What we are left with, is very different from
we had started with, similar to a memory which fades with time.

4. Dhvani Behl

She is a printmaker who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is greatly influenced by nature, and she runs a popular design studio, Flora for Fauna, in Delhi. According to an interview she did with the Hindustan Times she is also greatly influenced by Japanese aesthetics. She believes that designs made from a human hand and not from a machine make a piece of art 'perfect.'

She experiments with machine knitting, stone inlay,woodcut, hand embroidery and digital printing among other techniques.

Dhvani Behl's printwork

5. Parul Gupta

Most of Gupta's work is drawing on paper. In her statement on her website, she says that she sees 'line' as a subject and her work follows architectural lines in built environments. She is also interested in the way we perceive the environment, and what happens to our perceptions when a subtle shift is made. Does that prompt us to question what we know and how we know it, she wonders.

Black and White Drawing by Parul Gupta

6. Prajakta Potnis

She is a Mumbai based artist who graduated from the JJ School of Arts. Her work centres around recontextualising every day household objects from familiar and well-worn items to objects that are quite alienating, distant and even eery.

"My endeavor is to build a relationship between the public and the private space, to see how the outside is affected by the inside, how various elements transgress and finally affect an individual.”

 

The Kitchen Debate, 2014 By Potnis