Majra and Jantar Mantar displayed as a dyptch
Nidhi is the 'mistress of intimacy'...it her her 'eye' that enables her to be constantly in love with her lived enviroment...to be able to see 'beauty' in shapes places and objects in a manner that has elemens of experintial narratives. the current body of works are layered montages of visual scapes and objects that have held imagination+fantasy over the last 'period'. Majra is a parrot she kept as a pet...but let go when she realised that the bird 'really' wanted to fly out. the bhu bus is the stable mode of transport in Deradoon and Jantar Mantar comes after a visit to Rajasthan.
after a long time it is refreshing to come across a painter who is engaged in simply painting her surroundings...observing them with an feminine intimacy...yet staying away from the political. Nidhi enjoys colours a lot...muddy earthy...yet fresh and pure. So after a point she just 'takes off'... playing around with the colours and the surface...combining techniques...mediums...and imaginations. though all this her flair for patters come out...the tail light of the blue bus in 'Majra'...the lights showing a village on a hill..the flowers and leaves arranged in the 'Nasreen' series. (yet) through her sensibility for pattern...Nidhi sometimes (often) introduces an (mechanical) architectural grid...opening up a whole new semantic direction.
Pricing some of her small format works more than her larger works just because they are precious....that is Nidhi Khurana for you
A view from my window, Oil and Mixes Media on board
Majra, Oil and mixed media on board 4x4 feet
Jantar Mantar, Oil and Mixed Media on Board
Nasreen1 Mixed Media on Board,
Nasreen 2 Mixed Media on Board
Rajpur Oil and Mixed Media on board
As a sculpture student she struggled to introduce colors and feminity in a department still dominated by a masculine definition of art and sculpture. One could not help but her engagement with the ‘playful’ and with colors even as her tutors disapproved. Frustrated by ‘Sculpture’ when she chased ceramics she got engrossed in the various possibilities of glazing…and got lost in the intricacies of it. From the onset one always knew her true calling was painting, but maybe Nidhi had to have her encounters with the alternatives to realize what painting meant to her and why she just had to paint. When one tries to articulate what are the key elements that define Nidhi’s pictorial practice, her engagement with the intimate, the desire to ‘play’ with the Form, and purely intuitive engagement with colors are the visible elements that come to mind. However what truly (can it be falsely?) gives aesthetic value to her works is the connection between Nidhi’s 'Personal' and her works. The connection does not come out of a concentrated effort to pitch the private within a larger discursive terrain, rather it comes from no effort at all, it is just a simple lucid flow, unpretentious and mirrors a certain kind of intimacy characteristic of her practice.
Staying and working from Dehradun allows Nidhi the kind of space away from the disciplinary mainstream which she has always wanted/needed to be able to explore her language in intimate isolation…as a tool to work in the margins of mainstream vocabularies. Her paintings are intimate not only because of the objects’ vision-scapes, but (and maybe more) because of them being vehicles of her ’independent’ ‘playful’, yet ‘soft’ spirit. They mirror the kind of ‘feminity’ Nidhi lives, without her realizing how much her paintings communicate about herself. Lately she has shown a certain tendency to ‘formalize’ her approach, however the inherent independence is so strong that any amount of conscious ‘disciplining’ never really sits on her. Nidhi’s understanding and handling of colors sit on the margins of being unconventional, but sometimes they definitely come out as untamed, at their most subdued times Nidhi’s use of colors are still breezy playful and at the same time communicate her relationship with her objects’ vision-scapes.
Her first show in Bombay/Mumbai presents a body of works made at a time when she feels finally settled into painting and show a certain confidence with articulation of semiotic and ‘formal’ values. Characteristically the artist ‘does not really care’…caring about reception is simply not her style …if it were the entire journey would have just not begun.
Nidhi Khurana is a painter, based in Deradun, currently enjoying an artistc sabbatical with her husband teaching art at the Welham Girls’ School, Dehradun
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