India Art Fair - 2025

Galerie ISA is thrilled to participate in the 16th edition of India Art Fair 2025. On display are works by Christian Achenbach, David Brian Smith, Louise Despont, Santiago Giralda, Vipeksha Gupta, Gregor Hildebrandt, Prasad KP, Idris Khan, Ian Malhotra, Anoushka Mirchandani, Gabriel Mills, Annie Morris, David Murphy, Emilie Pugh and Ricky Vasan. Galerie ISA’s showcase for this edition of the India Art Fair spans landscape, abstract and figurative genres.

German sculpture and painter Christian Achenbach’s bold landscapes reflect a unique synchronicity with multiple movements and ideologies—Modern, Dadaism, and Cubism. He uses landscapes as a motif or form in his expression. For British landscape artist David Brian Smith, a strong connection to nature is akin to connecting with his roots. These bucolic works are inspired by the tradition of the Brotherhood of the Ruralists, a group founded in 1975 in Somerset, England focusing on depictions of rural and the natural forms. Madrid-based Santiago Giralda is known for his highly detailed canvases that draw from art history as well as classic landscapes, layering traditions with new technologies for the highly digitalized, highly visual world we live in. Prasad KP pays homage to his home-state of Kerala and it’s landscapes while ruminating the state of modern living where it’s man versus machine. Under the surface of his watercolours are hidden figures and characters, to show the vanishing of folklore, tradition and mythology as well as man-made devastation. In this hyper visual world we live in, British Indian artist Ian Malhotra explores the transmission of 21st century landscape imagery using Binary and Morse code and line drawings. Using pen and graphite on archival printmaking paper, the artist laboriously translates romanticized landscapes through a digital lens.

New Delhi’s Vipeksha Gupta’s luminous works are a series of meditations on consciousness, the physical and the metaphysical. Gupta’s work is highly stratified, she explores concepts through graphite, charcoal and pigments. Every effort, every coating, still remains visible at the end, reiterating her belief that eternity is an embroidery of experiences that come together, in contrast Gabriel Mill’s highly textured abstract works are an exploration of time, love and place. For the artist, the act of painting is more than just a showcase of technique and tradition but is in fact a transformative exercise, furthering introspection and a deeper understanding of self. David Murphy is medium agnostic—-using everything from steel tubing to Murano glass—to further a fascination with materiality, processes and histories. He is drawn to textiles, and the touchpoint of man versus machine layering primary colours to showcase the warp and weft as well as the topography of natural forms.

Spanning collage, painting and sculpture, German artist’s Gregor Hildebrandt’s works are dynamic, referencing music, cinema and subversive cultures. Using vinyls, cassettes, and magnetic tapes, Hildebrandt’s works defy definition, relying on viewers to create their own experience. Spirituality and interconnectedness of all living beings is at the heart of Emilie Pugh’s practice that draws on systems of belief. Pugh uses a wide range of materials and the unconventional method of mark making to showcase a state of flux and the tension between the transient and permanent, while Idris Khan’s multi-media works use technology to reveal tone and colour density, sources references from art to music and history, and excavates memory, creativity and a layering of experiences in his practice. Through repetition and action, his work is detailed, intensely layered and straddles the lines of abstraction and figuration. Annie Morris’s totemic sculptures are symbolic of the love for form and shape that underlines Morris’ work. Feminine, abstract and subtle, they showcase the artist’s ability to work across varied mediums.

Anoushka Mirchandani’s figurative practice explores her dual identity as an Indian-born, California based artist. The idea of assimilation, of being a woman (and a woman of colour), as well as an exploration of ancestry, roots and storytelling are all the basis of her dramatic works. Galerie ISA’s first artist in residence Ricky Vasan is a celebration of the mundane, the minutiae of life and also the immigrant experience. His figurative works are autobiographical, rooted in nostalgia and showcasing the people, moments and places that are important to him. Louise Despont’s new body of work on antique canvases from the late 19th century, furthers her exploration into the healing power of plants, familiar forms from architecture or the body meld with fragments of micro-patterns of a stone or a flower, each piece oscillating between the microscopic and the cosmic.

Priyanka R. Khanna