Paintings
Commissions, 2012
Commissions are paintings that have been commissioned by private individuals and corporations globally. More paintings to be uploaded soon.
Studio, 2012
Studio is a selection of new paintings from the artist’s studio. More paintings to be uploaded soon.
Hidden Geographies, 2012 (Solo)
Hidden Geographies references historical styles like Romanticism and Impressionism and the lyrical agency of female vanguard painters like Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, while positing a contrary paradigm to Western art historical ideals, evident in her choice of color and dense patterning. Ray’s metascapes are suspended in time between mythos and reality exposing an intimate topography of the subconscious mind.
Small works, 2010-2012
Small works are either small finished works or studies that result from leftover paint in the studio, which Ray appropriates as residue of the larger format paintings.
Landscape as Metaphor, 2009-2011
Landscape as Metaphor draw upon the physical and poetical aspects of urban life in Mumbai city with its shifts, nuances and complexities. Drawing on earlier experiments with abstract painting and the natural realm, these paintings further the investigation of materiality and abstraction, forming an enquiry into the tension between the image and its relationship to meaning.
Traversations, 2006
Traversations combine the words of “travel” and “conversations” to explore the kinetic nature of migration in painterly form. The artist had just moved from the United States to India and these small-format works have a heightened interiority that evokes the intimate spaces of the psyche. Their miniature quality - a compact study of color, gesture and blurring effects - belies their psychological momentum.
Crossroads, 2003-2004
Crossroads investigates a significant inflection point in the artist’s life related to cultural identity. She combines her figurative sensibilities and draftsmanship skills with a painterly, abstract language using a monochromatic palette and densely worked surfaces rendered with oil and wax to create narratives about displacement post 9/11. The series was awarded the Joan Mitchell M.F.A. Grant.
Mybrids, 2002
Mybrids is one of Sharmistha’s last purely figurative works before she entered into the realm of abstract painting. This large-format triptych takes on a self-reflexive position to explore the philosophical condition of "anxiety" in a globalizing world. Embodying both human and animal features, these grotesque creatures exist in permanent exile amongst leaves and dense foliage.
