VIPEKSHA GUPTA     

Continuum: A Passage Through Life And Afterlife

 

January 8 - February  21 2026, Galerie ISA, Mumbai, India

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 “Painting is a state of being. Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” –Jackson Pollock

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 One recognizes the fraught polemics of thrusting a proclamation by Jackson Pollock on any artist, let alone one born nearly a century later, in a context where notions of craft and cosmos are inherently intertwined and art historical mantles--both east and west–are ever present and intuitively enmeshed. But such is the reward of immersing oneself in the refracted color fields of Vipeksha Gupta.

Identifying the “pulse between the inward sanctuary and outer journey as the heart of her process,” Gupta’s mode of artmaking is less an epic struggle than it is a heightened state of consciousness, gradually forming and reforming towards new states of simultaneous being. In her 2020 “Vedana” series {Pali: Vedanā, English: Sensations} she exploits the material possibilities of pencil and charcoal on strategically indented white paper, conveying to the viewer the possibilities of multiple planes of existence with the slightest disruption of the monochrome. Her next body of work “Cerise” would then spill into the realm of red--the longest light wave visible to the human eye–slowly morphing between the darkness of blood to rust, the color of flesh to the rising sun. The internal becomes external and internal again, all grounded in the shadows of a geometric structure, slit, nipped and tucked. As viewers, her works perform as portals which beckon us to partake in her journey as well. They bring to mind Anish Kapoor’s 1000 Names (1979-1985), inducing moments of embodied perception, when color fuses into medium, experience, and a means of transformation.

Taking this sensation a critical step further, Vipeksha Gupta imbues an underlying principle of flux onto broader notions of the traditional artistic ‘medium.’ While her work captures the elements of radiance and intimacy associated with the giants of abstract painting, one must recall that “Transience” as one of the key tenets of Gupta’s practice. Technically, her works are drawings, conceived by high-pressure layering and arranging of dry pigment, graphite, charcoal, and pastel onto Fabriano paper; which in turn is fused to an aluminum sheet save the careful crease forming an oblique pyramid across the page, situating the work in the domain of sculpture. At the same time–and as testament to the artist’s masterful apprehension of light–the ampoules of color spread as if generated by a photo-chemical process [one can even leap to Cory Archangel’s digital mimicry of the same phenomena], but then, we come back, only to revel in the mysterious tactility of the artist’s hand. Deftly subverting taxonomic assumptions, her paintings are paintings in that they underscore the illusionism implicit in the vocabulary of painting itself.

Within the arc of Vipeksha Gupta’s practice, the “fold” has emerged as one of her signature devices. Long considered a metric of artistic brilliance [in Hellenistic sculpture, for example, drapery was the means by which carving could convey movement, human presence, and pathos] Gupta arrived at the motif vis-a-vis her personal experience during the pandemic: for her, the hard-edge ‘peak’ symbolized the triumph of light from the dark trap created by its very ascension. It was a realization that “there is no coming to consciousness without pain” that she has formulated a living paradigm of samsaric logic–one that recursively shapes her practice, and likewise, keeps us coming back for more. From “Cerise”, she moves forth to “Ebullience”, harnessing renewed internal and external energies by introducing cool, heavenly blues and clouds of earthly green. And with ‘‘Iridescence”’ flashes from her earlier palette–white, black, red, and rust–fuse into washes of lavender; erstwhile rectilinear compositions bend to the curvilinear, and then, as she iterates her bisections, we observe the inverse of the fold–an apparition of an imminent chasm.

Harnessing the rhythms of this cyclical consciousness–or as she puts it “the mind reconfiguring its own architecture,” Gupta’s most recent body of work–“Cadance”--invokes her grandest spatial arrangements to date. Associations oscillate between the landscape and architecture, modernist tropes and the Kantian sublime, specters of futurism and the touch of the body–always rooted in the interiority of the mind and soul, the “light in the dark.” Replete with moments of chance and metamorphosis, Gupta embarks on a wider and deeper analytical study on the silent rhythms embedded in gradients of color and light. On the opposite spectrum of red, violet–the shortest wavelength visible to the human eye–emerges as if a densely layered sonic texture, a cosmic boom. While some colors interact in diffracted hovers, others do so via gesture, suggesting their afterlife at the work’s very edge. Throughout Vipeksha Gupta’s practice, it is the moment of confrontation with physical phenomena that silence us: she explains, “silence becomes color and color becomes a cycle in the reincarnation rhythm.” In this way, Gupta’s practice pays as much homage to Rothko as it does the women who created the sacred lawon silks of South Sumatra, devising a method of materiality, space, and light that is decidedly her own.

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–Pujan Gandhi