The Open Studio / Rakesh
Rakesh
Compressed Ground 1
Where the ground keeps moving, faces dissolve into colour
Brick red runs down the paper like rain on a mud wall.
A blue-faced figure lifts two arms into the heat.
Someone stands in cream, their face a green stone.
Four small grey drawings hang like windows to a crowded street.
At the bottom a dark line wanders, a path or a drain.
Everything drips. Nothing holds still long enough to be home.
The work
Rakesh grew up in a village in Madhya Pradesh. He came to know places through mud houses, fields and the rhythms of village life. Later he lived in an informal settlement in New Delhi. There space is always changed, repaired and rebuilt. His work grows out of this shift. In this large mixed media piece five figures stand in washes of brick red, ochre and blue. Most of their faces are flat discs of green and blue. Small grey drawings are fixed across the surface.
- Theme
- Places that keep changing
- Material
- Mixed media
- Size
- 272 × 155 cm
- Year
- 2026
- Edition
- -
- Framed
- No
- About the artist
- Sarojini Naidu School Of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad
- From
- New Delhi
- Code
- RC-390
In the artist’s words
My practice began with a personal shift in the way I experienced space. Growing up in a village in Madhya Pradesh, I understood places through everyday interactions with mud houses, fields, and the rhythms of rural life. Later, living in an informal settlement in New Delhi exposed me to a very different spatial condition, where space was constantly negotiated, altered, repaired, and rebuilt. Experiencing these contrasting environments made me realize that when places change, they do more than transform physically; they reshape the ways people inhabit, understand, and relate to the world around them. I am interested in the experiences that disappear as environments are continuously transformed through development, ecological…
