What Not to Wear on a Horse

A warm shifting checkerboard-like interplay of dark sienna and indigo versus corals, pinks and reds balance a single chartreuse square at the bottom left. Prashant Salvi’s intriguing integration of oil and other types of particles with pigment add texture to his layered applications of color and slow down the reading of his work. The presence of the series recedes slightly from its conceptual companion due to its paler shades and thinned applications of paint. Another vertical composition, its right hand column of squares is cropped. There are sets of smaller squares faintly visible with the atmospheric blocks of grey green and rust. The piece is punctuated by a dark, glittering square flanked by a small flat red box abutting the right edge of the painting. I have found my center. He creates rich, sensual, colorful, intensely felt, and jarringly material paintings. With sumptuous colors and richly encrusted Salvi seeks to bring from the gathered quiddities that stew of unnamable visual and emotional qualities of the world a visual situation intended to generate both intense engagement and quiet contemplation in the viewer.

 

Left Artist Prashant Salvi and Abhijeet Gondkar in Nippon gallery-Mumbai

Taking a step into Prashant Salvi’s space, I realize the works as a whole invite a natural sifting through and pleasurable classification of his pictorial modes. This parallels his creative process. The artist presently exercises capabilities that engage a density of formative parameters. There is the intensity of attention; there is the tolerance for the confounding as well as the compounding of that which is discernible; there is the alertness to attraction, which drives the sorting and apprizing through the oceanic character of phenomenology. What Not to Wear on a Horse includes an array of other works revealing the range of Salvi’s phenomenological investigations. The series exemplifies the dense, over-all gestural painted lines he had long used for their arousal of kinetic sensation. Some result from his long held fascination with archetypal, insistent geometric configurations, which appear and disappear as they are framed and formed in his irregular shifting fields. What Not to Wear on a Horse refers to particulars in the visual and emotional world which catch the artist’s eye and stir his mind, and from which he draws substance for his imaginative proposals. Among these bits and pieces of the real world, interactions occur and compel decisions of color, form, and surface to go in unexpected directions. Aspects of artifacts make their appearance in his paintings repeatedly. Salvi seizes upon the essential visual properties he sees in these objects which, when filtered through his ever churning mind, become archetypes to be used and adapted endlessly, items in his ever evolving creative vocabulary. While Salvi’s work is grounded by an empirical approach to the quiddities of this world, it attains transcendence by providing the viewer with the contemplative space in which to engage with mysterious new worlds. The works embrace the persistent yet fleeting nature of time and examines this force as a unifying factor of human existence.

 

The artist draws inspiration from a variety of art forms, to create complex, highly imaginative works that fuse distinct cultural references and modes of artistic representation in What Not to Wear on a Horse. While the artist find inspiration in numerous sources, his distinct visual language is always charged with personal significance, incorporating his fantasy universe, for example, recall the yellow-tinged light that permeated the artists’ childhood home, while his vast array of signs and symbols are often drawn from his own dreams. Throughout this new body of work the artist gives space and form to his vivid inner world, and the works collapse distinctions between body, architecture, fantasy and sacred geometry, to create a universe where the self fantastically converges with the wider world. An airplane emerges to greet the bird on the window sill. Defying conventions of perspectival space, Salvi’s works complicate notions of figure and ground; in The Bird Song the central figure depicts a fantastical landscape, as if another universe is springing forth from the subject’s head. The work’s striped; brightly-colored background recalls the geometric compositions on the vibrant surfaces. Across Salvi’s patterned surface, the central figure’s limbs cast long shadows, and the artists’ geometric worlds reveal traces of their inhabitants at every turn, blending painting practices to thwart distinctions between interiority and exteriority, figure and ground, and self and world. Representing their dreamlike universe, Prashant Salvi considers space an expansive term that simultaneously encompasses both the public sphere and inner fantasy.

 

For Salvi, these works explore psychological conditions, manifested in the physiology of the human form.  What Not to Wear on a Horse represents the synthesis of opposing forces, physical and emotional, traditional and unexpected. The series challenges our accepted impressions of the world around us.  For this series, the artist contorts with images that evoke anthropomorphic physical qualities and movement.  Pulling the reference from his daily life and childhood, Salvi re-envisions in unexpected contexts to challenge our perceptions of the objects in reality.  True to Salvi’s practice, these works are both familiar yet strange and evoke pause and contemplation from the viewer.

WHAT NOT TO WEAR ON A HORSE

Solo Show by Prashant Salvi

Nippon Gallery, Fort, Mumbai, presents What Not to Wear on a Horse, a solo exhibition by artist Prashant Salvi, curated by Abhijeet Gondkar.

Through his distinctive visual language, Salvi brings together humour, imagination and intriguing characters, inviting viewers into a world that is playful yet thought-provoking.

Preview: 18 August 2026 | 5 PM onwards

Exhibition continues: 18–29 August 2026

Gallery Timings: 3 PM – 7 PM

Nippon Gallery

Flora Fountain, Fort, Mumbai – 400 001

Curated by Abhijeet Gondkar

Come experience What Not to Wear on a Horse at Nippon Gallery.

#NipponGallery #NipponGalleryMumbai #FortMumbai #mumbaiartfestival  

 

Abhijeet Gondkar

August 2026, Mumbai

“FOUR VISIONS - ONE EXHIBITION” Art Exhibition by 4 renowned artists in Nehru Centre Art Gallery

Dr. D. N. Baraskar 

D. N. Baraskar’s photography discovers the extraordinary within the quiet rhythms of everyday life. His lens is drawn to the particular light of rural India—the glow of dusk over a village, a craftswoman completing her work, or boats returning beneath a changing sky. Rather than seeking spectacle, Baraskar observes with patience and reverence, revealing the dignity of labour, landscape, and human presence. 

His images possess a contemplative stillness, allowing ordinary moments to unfold naturally before the viewer. Working beyond the metropolitan gallery circuit, he brings an authentic, unhurried sensitivity to his subjects, transforming familiar scenes into evocative reflections on time, place, and memory.

Nitai Das

Nitai Das’s art emerges from India’s remarkable continuity between its epic past, living traditions, and rapidly changing present. Born in Ranir Bazaar, Tripura, and raised in a culturally rich environment, Das developed an artistic language deeply rooted in Indian heritage while remaining open to influences from the wider world. His education at Santiniketan and later professional journey with Doordarshan took him across different cultural landscapes, yet his connection with his roots remained strong.

In his recent works, mythology, spirituality, folklore, and contemporary life come together in compelling visual narratives. Images of Shiva, Ganesha, Lakshmi, Christ, Chaitanya, Pandavvani traditions, and even contemporary figures appear alongside farmers, performers, students, and travellers. Through these juxtapositions, Das explores love, conflict, faith, identity, and the complexities of modern existence.

His practice recalls the humanistic traditions of artists such as Jamini Roy, Gaganendranath Tagore, and Ramkinkar Baij. Like a modern-day patua of Tripura, Nitai Das transforms deeply local experiences into universal stories, creating art that remains authentic, rooted, and globally resonant.

Dr. Pralay Dutta 

Pralay Dutta works in a register entirely different from the figurative and photographic idioms around him at this show, his is the language of pure abstraction, built from architecture rather than anecdote. In his canvases, geometric planes of grey, white and charcoal collide with sudden eruptions of red, ochre and electric blue, as though a city had been dismantled into its constituent moods and reassembled without regard for gravity. There is something of the urban excavation in his method: blocks stacked and half erased, a horizon line broken by a black bar, colour pooling like memory in the crevices between forms.

Dutta's abstraction never entirely abandons structure, verticals and rectilinear shapes hold the composition together even as the paint itself seems to want to dissolve them. It is tempting to read in this tension something of the Indian city itself, perpetually under construction and demolition at once, its heat and dust rendered here in oxide reds and cool greys. Where the other artists in this show anchor themselves in figure and landscape, Dutta insists that emotion and place can be conveyed just as precisely through colour and form alone.

Subhash Roy 

Subhash Roy's paintings sit at the meeting point of figuration and dissolution, his subjects, usually women draped in soft fabric, emerge from and recede back into fields of wet, blended colour as if photographed mid exposure. In Unspoken Bonds, three women lean into each other, their faces softened almost to abstraction, the emotional weight of the painting carried less by expression than by proximity and posture, the unspoken bond of the title made visible simply through how close the bodies stand. In Nature's Embrace, the figure gives way almost entirely to landscape, human form and organic shape becoming indistinguishable, blues and ochres running into each other like tributaries.

Roy's technique, loose, atmospheric, willing to let the paint bleed past its own outlines, puts him closer to the lyrical abstractionists than to the hard edged colourists elsewhere in this exhibition. What holds his work together is intimacy: even at his most abstract, there is always a suggestion of touch, of bodies near each other, of feeling withheld just below the surface of the paint.

The participating artists intend to donate a portion of the proceeds from the sale of artworks in this exhibition towards the welfare and relief of the flood-affected people of Assam.

This show will be inaugurated on 1^st September 2026 at 5.30pm by Honourable Guests Shri. Rajendra Patil, President – The Bombay Art Society, Director - India Art Festival, Vinita Mirchandani, Owner of Studio 3 Gallery, Shri. Prakash Bal Joshi Eminent Artist & Chairman, Artists Centre Art Gallery, Shri. Prayag Shukla, Art Critic, Poet, Curator

 

 From: 1^st to 7^th September 2026

“FOUR VISIONS - ONE EXHIBITION”

Art Exhibition by 4 renowned artists - Nitai Das, Dr. D.N. Baraskar, Dr. Pralay Dutta, Subhash Roy

 

VENUE:

Nehru Centre Art Gallery

AC Gallery

Dr. Annie Besant Road

Worli, Mumbai 400018

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: 9873058958 / 9560619825

“PRAVAH” Solo Show of Paintings By well-known artist Anjali Prabhakar in Jehangir Art Gallery

There is a flow within us that is rarely still. It moves quietly beneath everyday life—through memory, emotion, thought, and experience. We may not always notice it, but it shapes how we feel, how we respond, and ultimately, how we see the world. It is this inner movement that forms the starting point for Pravāh, a body of work by Anjali Prabhakar. Anjali’s practice has developed alongside a deep engagement with meditation and an awareness of the energy that exists within and around us. She does not approach the canvas with a finished image in mind. Often, there is simply a feeling, a colour, or an impulse that she wants to follow. The painting then becomes a way of staying with that feeling and seeing where it takes her.

Artist: Anjali Prabhakar

The most interesting aspect of her process is that the artist does not try to explain an emotion through the painting, nor does she try to give it a fixed form. Instead, she allows herself to work intuitively, responding to what is happening on the canvas. She allows these discoveries to happen rather than forcing the painting towards a predetermined conclusion.

Colour is perhaps where the energy of these paintings is felt most immediately. Anjali responds to colour instinctively, allowing it to carry the mood of the moment rather than assigning it a fixed meaning. The deep reds, blues, and luminous passages that recur through the works can feel intense, warm, quiet, or expansive, sometimes within the same painting. They draw us in before we have had the chance to make sense of them. In that sense, colour becomes more than what we see—it becomes something we feel. Meditation, on the other hand, has also taught her the value of stillness. For her, stillness is not a withdrawal from the world, but a way of becoming more attentive to what is happening within. It is in this quieter state that she finds the space to notice subtle shifts in feeling and energy, and to allow them to enter the work without forcing them into words or fixed forms.

Pravāh is Sanskrit for flow or current—it is ultimately a meeting place. It is about the things we carry within us and the ways they shift with time. It is about allowing rather than controlling, and about recognising that not everything we experience needs to be explained in order to be felt.

Pravāh, therefore, is that meeting point—a space between stillness and movement, between what is felt and what can be expressed, between the inner world and the canvas.

 

This show will be inaugurated on 31^st August 2026 at 4.30pm by Honourable Chief Guest Mrs. Nidhi Chaudhari, IAS, Director – NGMA, Mumbai

Special Guest – Dr. Kishor Ingle, Director, Directorate of Art, Maharashtra

Guests of Honor – Prof. Him Kumar Chatterjee, Vice Chancellor, Sir J.J.School of Art, Architecture & Design, Mumbai, Shri. Prayag Shukla, Art Critic, Poet, Fiction Writer, Curator, Shri. Rajendra Patil, President – The Bombay Art Society, Director - India Art Festival, Mrs. K.G. Menon, Secretary Jehangir Art Gallery, Shri. Praveen Upadhye, Artist, Founder Director, Gallery Pioneer New Delhi

 

Shraddha Purnaye

Art Researcher & Writer

 From 31st August to 6^th September 2026

“PRAVAH”

Solo Show of Paintings

By well-known artist 

Anjali Prabhakar

 

VENUE:

Jehangir Art Gallery

M.G. Road, Kala Ghoda, 

Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400001

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: +91 9425195496

“DYNAMIC DIVINE” A Group Exhibition of Sculptures by 4 renowned sculptors in Jehangir Art Gallery

 Recent sculptures made by a Renowned sculptors, Kiran Adate, Sushma Walavalkar Adate, Kiran Shigvan, Karuna Shigvan will be showcased in a group art exhibition at Jehangir Art Gallery, Auditorium Hall, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400 001 from 25^th to 31^st August 2026 between 11am to 7pm.

Kiran Adate – “Emotions”

Kiran Adate’s Emotions, carved by hand in black marble, explores the silent language of human connection. The intertwined figures express love, intimacy, comfort, and the profound emotional bond shared between two individuals. The sculpture’s smooth, flowing forms merge seamlessly, suggesting that emotions can transcend words, identity, and physical boundaries. The powerful darkness of black marble creates a striking contrast with the tenderness of the embrace, symbolising both strength and vulnerability. Through refined craftsmanship and expressive form, Adate transforms stone into a sensitive meditation on togetherness, affection, and the universal emotions that connect human beings beyond identity and form.

 

Sushma Walavalkar Adate – “Dynamic Dancing”

Sushma Walavalkar Adate’s Dynamic Dancing celebrates movement, rhythm, freedom, and human expression through abstract sculptural forms. Cast in bronze, the work captures the fleeting energy of dance through flowing lines, extended limbs, and expressive gestures. The forms appear to move beyond their physical boundaries, creating a powerful sense of continuous motion. The inherent strength of bronze contrasts beautifully with the delicacy and fluidity of the figures, establishing a dialogue between solidity and movement. Through abstraction, Adate transforms the language of dance into sculpture, exploring balance, energy, grace, and the rhythmic pulse of life. Her work evokes movement frozen in a timeless moment.

 

Kiran Shigvan

Kiran Shigvan’s sculptures explore the intersection of anatomical precision, restraint, and sensitivity to material. Working primarily in fibreglass and bronze, he creates human figures marked by controlled gestures and quiet psychological intensity. His sculptures often appear paused in moments of thought, contemplation, or reflection, inviting viewers to look beyond physical appearance. Fibreglass brings contemporary immediacy to his work, while bronze connects it with a longer sculptural tradition. Shigvan’s disciplined treatment of form allows material to speak without overpowering the subject. His figures embody vulnerability, fatigue, resilience, and contemplation with dignity. Through simplicity, silence, and restraint, his sculptures encourage viewers to pause, observe, and deeply engage.

Karuna Shigvan

Karuna Shigvan’s sculptures are lyrical, devotional, and deeply introspective, shaped by her engagement with feminine presence, music, mythology, and cultural memory. Her figures—often women, musicians, and dual-faced visages—represent states of being such as listening, offering, waiting, and remembering. Working in bronze and fibreglass, she creates richly textured surfaces inspired by textiles, jewellery, and ritual ornamentation. Elements such as the flute, peacock feather, and inward-tilted head suggest music translated into stillness. Her elongated proportions and graceful gestures evoke Indian classical and bhakti traditions. Through intimacy and subtle symbolism, Karuna Shigvan transforms sculpture into a contemplative experience, inviting viewers toward silence, connection, and reverence.

From: 25^th to 31^st August 2026

“DYNAMIC DIVINE”

The Art of Sculpture

A Group Exhibition of Sculpture

By

Kiran Adate, Sushma Walavalkar Adate, Kiran Shigvan, Karuna Shigvan

 

VENUE:

Jehangir Art Gallery

Auditorium Hall

161-B, M.G. Road

Kala Ghoda, Mumbai – 400001

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: +91 9323210327, +91 9167907095

 

“SPANDANE” Solo Show of Paintings By Renowned artist Sachin Sagare in Jehangir Art Gallery

SPANDANE

Spandane is delicate, but potent. Spandane literally means vibration. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This particular brand of manipulation is familiar territory for painter Sachin Sagare, who in his seventeenth solo show is proving himself a consummate craftsman of this complex emotion. His twenty-one elegiac paintings on display each take the form of womanhood, but what drives this artist’s moody remembrances is the figurative element within each work: Spandane surrogates that what is always beautiful, winsome, and perfectly attired. Today’s practice of acrylic painting is itself fueled by nostalgia, reminding us of a purer time when art seemed to have a sacred quality, either literally or figuratively. What’s remarkable about his practice, however, is the way he uses different strategies to describe not only memory but also the fading of memory that stirs in us a longing to be reunited with our past.

Artist: Sachin Sagare 

In his dreamy paintings of women in verdant landscapes, Sagare toys with conventional associations of nature, femininity, childhood and innocence. The foregrounds of his pictures are occupied by colorful women. Sagare paints these with a deft, brushy touch that gives the surfaces of his canvases a sensuously tactile presence. The diminutive figures of women that Sagare inserts into these environments look almost as if they’d been present in nostalgia, Sagare’s primary focus is on the unspoken the silent scenes that carry thought beneath their calm surface. He gazes through these images to understand how history lives in bodies and behaviors, especially those of women, who often remained functional yet invisible within dominant narratives.

With few if any signs of civilization in view, you get the feeling they’ve escaped not only from parental supervision and the rules of their community but from modernity in general and the mess made of the world by the Industrial Revolution. It’s a short step to see Sagare’s heroines’ escape into the bosom of Mother Nature as a romantic protest against the dominion of patriarchal consciousness. Insofar as the artist himself may be said to personify the life and freedom of art and imagination. This gives Sagare’s paintings a touching personal urgency. He’s projecting his own sense of what it takes to be an artist in the modern world. You have to be some kind of outlaw. He employs an academic style, showing off the gestural nature of figure painting. Every stroke reflects a motion, yet everything is precise, with intention.

Very few contemporary figurative painters reveal subtle enigmatic juxtaposition. Artist such as Sachin Sagare uses caricature, irony and broad stylization to deliberately provoke, filtered through a faux academic plainness, the paintings in the current series done between 2025 and 2026 depict multi figure scenes populated by late adolescent women engaged in enigmatic encounters, or just as often disengaged and daydreaming. Women roam in mass in sarees and blouses, barefoot with vermilion smeared over their forehead. All the paintings seem woven from disparate sources. Sachin Sagare’s female protagonists seem to project something different from these sources, perhaps a more contemporary hauteur. They never fully declare just what they are up to, and seem unhurried by events. The multiple scenarios on display are like formal qualities of the paintings, still ever so slightly sketchy and undercooked, but with much to savor for those who like their mysteries that way.

This show will be inaugurated on 25th August 2026 at 5.30pm by Honorable Chief Guest - Parvez Damania Director – Mumbai Art House, Guest of Honor – Sonam Shivdutt Das Chairperson –Shivdutt Das Art Foundation

Abhijeet Gondkar

Art curator & writer

 From: 25th August to 31st August 2026

Sacred Moments Beyond Words Solo Show of Paintings

By Renowned artist Sachin Sagare

VENUE: Jehangir Art Gallery

161-B, M.G. Road

Kala Ghoda, Mumbai 400001

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: +91 9011251869 Email: mindscape.sachin@gmail.com

 

"Collectively Independent 2026" An Exhibition of Paintings by Bharti Verma, Ramos, Ruchi Chadha and Sapna Gupta at Visual Art Gallery

Inner Konnect Art (IKA) presents Collectively Independent 2026 — Beyond the Visible, bringing together four independent artistic voices—Bharti Verma, Ramos, Ruchi Chadha and Sapna Gupta—whose practices, while distinct in language and approach, share an engagement with what lies beyond the immediately visible.

An artist-led initiative, IKA has for over a decade created a platform for independent artists, encouraging artistic exchange, dialogue and meaningful engagement between artists and audiences. Collectively Independent continues this spirit by placing individual practices together without imposing a common visual language, allowing each artist’s work to retain its own identity.

Bharti Verma, an artist with over three decades of practice, explores the emotional and psychological presence of the human figure. Drawing from her early engagement with literature and her longstanding interest in memory and silence, her figures are not portraits but vessels of unnamed emotions and shared human experiences. Her restrained black-and-white and muted palette, punctuated by occasional colour, creates an atmosphere of intimacy, vulnerability and quiet resilience.

Ramos approaches abstraction through instinct, spirituality and an intimate connection with nature. Largely self-taught as an artist and photographer, his practice has evolved from minimalist landscapes towards complete abstraction. Working primarily in oils, he creates richly textured surfaces through layering, scratching and expressive mark-making. Influenced by the landscapes of Uttarakhand and by artists including Nasreen Mohamedi, Ram Kumar, Paul Klee and Hilma af Klint, his paintings become spaces where energy, memory and contemplation converge.

Ruchi Chadha, a graduate of the College of Art, New Delhi, brings more than three decades of engagement with painting and ceramics. Nature, water and the cycles of transformation form the foundation of her practice. In her ongoing lotus series, she shifts the viewer’s perspective beneath the water, revealing the darkness, silt, weeds and filtered light from which the lotus emerges. The flower becomes a metaphor for resilience, hope, renewal and transcendence.

Sapna Gupta, a New Delhi–based abstract artist, works intuitively through texture, material and an enduring dialogue with nature. Her paintings evolve through spontaneous gestures, earthy pigments and layered surfaces, allowing each work to discover its own direction. Gold appears as a subtle source of light, representing inner richness, resilience and transformation rather than material wealth. Her works invite viewers to surrender certainty and experience the freedom and energy within nature and the self.

Together, the four artists offer contrasting yet complementary perspectives—moving from the human figure to abstraction, from water and earth to memory and emotion. Beyond the Visible invites viewers to look beyond surface and form, towards the intangible experiences that give art its emotional resonance.

The Inauguration

The exhibition was inaugurated in the presence of an esteemed gathering of art, cultural and creative personalities. The occasion was graced by the Guests of Honour Ms Raseel Gujral Ansal, Mr Naveen Ansal, Mr Samar Jodha and Mr Manu Mansheet Rai, whose presence added significance to the opening.

Ms Raseel Gujral Ansal is a prominent figure in India’s art and cultural landscape, known for her association with contemporary art, design and creative initiatives. Her longstanding engagement with the arts has contributed to creating greater visibility and appreciation for contemporary artistic practices.

Mr Naveen Ansal is associated with the Ansal family’s longstanding contribution to architecture, real estate and the development of Delhi’s cultural and urban landscape. His presence at the exhibition reflects an appreciation of art as an integral part of contemporary life and society.

Mr Samar Jodha is an internationally recognised photographer and filmmaker whose practice engages deeply with people, cultures, social narratives and the environment. His work has taken him across diverse geographies and communities, using visual storytelling as a means of creating awareness and human connection.

Mr Manu Mansheet Rai, known for his engagement with the creative and cultural sphere, has been associated with initiatives that bring together art, ideas and contemporary expression. His presence at the opening further strengthened the exhibition’s emphasis on artistic dialogue and independent creative voices.

The inauguration celebrated not only the opening of Collectively Independent 2026, but also the spirit behind it—art by artists and for artists, where individual voices can come together while remaining authentically independent.

The exhibition will remain open to visitors from 20 to 25 August 2026, from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm, at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.

 Collectively Independent 2026 — Beyond the Visible

An Exhibition of Paintings by Bharti Verma, Ramos, Ruchi Chadha and Sapna Gupta

20–25 August 2026

Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, New Delhi

11:00 am – 7:00 pm