"Divine Texture of Culture" An Exhibition of Sculptures by Kiran Shigvan, Karuna Shigvan

Kiran Shigvan:

Kiran Shigvan’s sculptures operate at the intersection of anatomical precision, restraint, and a sensitivity to material behaviour. Working primarily in fibreglass and bronze, he demonstrates a disciplined command over form, allowing the human figure to emerge not as show but as a site of quiet psychological intensity. His sculptures often appear paused mid-thought or mid-breath, suggesting an inward turn rather than an outward performance. There is no excess here, gesture is economised, surfaces are controlled, and the body is treated as a vessel of lived experience rather than an object of idealisation.

What is striking is Shigvan’s ability to let material speak without overpowering the subject. Fibreglass lends his figures a contemporary immediacy, while bronze anchors them within a longer sculptural lineage, creating a productive tension between the present and the classical. His figures carry the weight of ordinary vulnerability; fatigue, contemplation, resilience, rendered with dignity and restraint. In an age of overstated narratives, Kiran Shigvan’s sculptures insist on slowness, silence, and deep looking.

Karuna Shigvan:

Karuna Shigvan’s sculptural language is lyrical, devotional, and inward-looking, shaped by an enduring engagement with feminine presence, musicality, and mythic memory. Her figures, often women, musicians, or dual-faced visages are not portraits in the literal sense but embodiments of states of being: listening, offering, waiting, remembering. Working with bronze and fibreglass, she builds surfaces through intricate texturing that recalls textiles, jewellery, and ritual ornamentation, allowing the skin of the sculpture to carry cultural memory and form.

There is a musical rhythm in her work; the flute, the peacock feather, the inward-tilted head, suggesting sound translated into stillness. Unlike heroic monumentality, Shigvan’s sculptures favour intimacy and grace; their elongated proportions and softened gestures evoke bhakti traditions and classical Indian aesthetics without slipping into pastiche. The duality of faces hints at layered identities: inner and outer selves, the temporal and the eternal. Her work draws the viewer into a quiet, sustained communion. In a contemporary moment obsessed with speed, Karuna Shigvan’s sculptures reclaim slowness as a form of reverence.

Sushma Sabnis 

Mumbai

From: 10th to 16th February 2026

"Divine Texture of Culture"

An Exhibition of Sculptures by Kiran Shigvan, Karuna Shigvan

VENUE: Nehru Center Art Gallery,

AC Gallery, Dr. Annie Besant Road, Worli, Mumbai 400018

Timing: 11am to 7pm

Contact: +91 77108 68631 / +91 77759 87011

You are cordially invited to an exhibition of painting and sculpture NEHA SUTHAR and NIPA MODI

 

You are cordially invited to an exhibition of painting and sculpture

NEHA SUTHAR and NIPA MODI

Preview:10th feb

Preview

10 th Feb

5:30 pm onwards Exhibition continues till 14th Feb-2026

Daily: 3 pm to 7pm

निप्पॉन गॅलरी

 मुंबई

RSVP 

NIPPON GALLERY

30/32, 2nd Floor, Deval Chambers

Nana Bhai Lane, Flora Fountain Fort, Mumbai - 400 001

More details: 9820 510 599 Email: nipponbombay@gmail.com

www.nippongallery.com

We look forward to your presence.

#nipponsolo #NEHA SUTHAR  #NIPA MODI #soloshow #kalaghodaartsfestival 2026 @abhijeet.gondkar @elsamartinistudio @tathi_premchand_studio @sardesaiabhay @abhicrit @niyatee_shinde @lbb.mumbai @indiaartfair @artmumbaiofficial @mumbaigalleryassoc @jnafmumbai

ARTIVAL FOUNDATION Presents "ART CONTINUUM 2026" An Art Exhibition of 30 Contemporary Renowned artists of India

 ART CONTINUUM 2026

Art Continuum is a landmark exhibition bringing together 30 respected contemporary artists from across India, reflecting the breadth and vitality of the present art landscape. 

The participating artists include Bhiva Punekar, Chandrakant Tajbije, Damodar Madgaonkar, Deepak Garud, Dhammapal Kirdak,Gautam Mukherjee, Gopal Pardeshi, Jaydeb Dolui, Jayshree Savani, Kappari Kishan, Manoj Das, Maredu Ramu, Mohan Naik, Mohit Naik, Nanda Pathak, Nilanjana Roy, Paneri Punekar, Pradip Sarkar, Puja Agrawal, Rahul Kirdak, Raju Autade, Reshma Shirke, Rucha Wavare, Satish Wavare, Seemmaa Hedaoo, Shailesh Gurav, Shashikant Patade, Dr. Shefali Bhujbal, Simrit Luthra, Tania Fatnani, Vaishali Vijay, Virendra Chopde, Vishal Phasale, Vishwajeet Naik among others.

Mohan Naik, Oil on canvas

Art has been integral to human civilization long before spoken language—emerging from cave walls, ritual objects, and symbolic gestures, and evolving into the complex visual cultures we inhabit today. Across centuries, art has remained a vital mode of communication, reflection, and cultural continuity. It transcends disciplinary boundaries, absorbing social, political, technological, and philosophical shifts while retaining its deeply human core.

Art Continuum situates itself within this lineage, not merely as an exhibition but as an evolving platform. Conceived as a nationwide journey, the exhibition brings together indigenous sensibilities and contemporary practices, drawing from both urban centres and rural landscapes. It foregrounds plurality—of regions, materials, lived experiences, and visual languages—without flattening their differences.

The exhibition opens at the Visual Art Gallery, Carpe Diem Art Gallery, South Goa, from January 28 to February 8, 2026, marking the first chapter of a national tour across major Indian cities

Artist: Bhiva Punekar

Art Continuum is an initiative of the Artival Foundation, a non-commercial organization founded in 2018 by Satish Patil and Sharad Gurav. The foundation has consistently worked to support established and emerging artists, with a particular emphasis on folk and tribal practices often marginalized within mainstream art discourse.

In an age of accelerating digital production, Art Continuum reasserts the enduring relevance of embodied, material, and relational art practices. It invites viewers, collectors, and cultural practitioners to engage with art as a living continuum—rooted in history, responsive to the present, and open to future possibilities.

Sushma Sabnis

Mumbai

ARTIVAL FOUNDATION 

Presents

"ART CONTINUUM 2026"

An Exhibition of Paintings 

By 30 Contemporary Renowned artists of India

Jan. 28 to Feb.8, 2026, Wed. to Sun. 10am to 7pm

VENUE: Carpe Diem Art Gallery, 81/2, Godinho House,

Costa Vaddo Road, Majorda, Goa  - 403713, For More Details : CALL / WHATSAPP 

+ 91 9920804573 / + 91 9833949788

 

Poison and Elixir - a solo exhibition by Elsa Martini. Curated by Abhijeet Gondkar

In the small square space of Gallery Nippon, up on the second floor of a town building, Elsa Martini’s solo show titled “Poison and Elixir” takes her viewer on a surreal, nostalgic walk reminiscent of 1980s school day walks in socialist and post-socialist Albania. Slightly more than half a dozen moderately sized and small acrylic paintings completed within the past year hang quietly on white walls. Elsa reflects on her own past with deep longing for times both missed and long since passed, bringing strange, forlorn, cross-continental energy into the depicted spaces. 

One striking factor in all of these paintings is her master skill of composition. Specifically, the complexity of composition in we don't know why we are here. While the staged nature of her painting in a contemporary context may at first glance appear uncomfortable, the classical construction feels unmistakably familiar. In this case, teenage girls with wandering glances appear hanging out together, but remain emotionally removed from each other in an industrial building amid an anachronistic landscape outside the window. Elsa’s painting thrives on that familiarity young women, most likely school-age right about when Elsa herself moved to Tirana, are positioned in poses suggesting conversation and interaction. Upon closer observation, however, every single figure appears implicitly lonely, gazing down or past the others. Elsa’s depictions of such gazes and poses play up the drama, while the work mirrors a state of being, one representing both nostalgia for a time since passed and a lost opportunity for connection. Similarly, Elsa’s color palette reflects on the particularity of time and place. Granite grays cast a shadow over this body of work. The warm pink gray colors are reminiscent of riverbank pedestrian paths along the Lanë River or Tanners’ Bridge (Ura e Tabakëve) testament to the craftsmanship and ingenuity of 18th-century Ottoman architects in Tirana where so many school girls have spent evenings hanging out after classes. Elsa uses a distinct palette well known to any Tirana native evoking the region’s long, dark winters, alongside rains.

Elsa uses paint to visualize the intangible subject of nostalgia. Even if the viewer is unfamiliar with the setting, there is a clear, recognizable sense of longing for the past. She doesn’t just yearn for one time or place, though, but a full bouquet of places, styles, relationships and interactions. The combination of sweaters, dresses and patterns ranges from the 1960s to the 1990s and even today, where vintage clothing finds a new life through thrift shops. For example, a mischievously reclining girl in the foreground in the family portrait We all had a green sofa wears a fuchsia  pink dress; this dress is reminiscent of a 1980s-era Bloomingdale’s catalog, but the adjacent figure could easily be taken as a contemporary passerby on the street in Gowanus. The mystery comes from the artist herself, who finds her models’ outfits in crevices of Brooklyn’s thrifting shops. The choice is conscious and deliberate as Elsa paints and repaints every figure to be both relatable yet a standalone monument to time. How does one capture time in a still image? Elsa seizes these moments by painting her subjects in passive actions such as reading, stretching or gazing outward.  The painterly application of brushstrokes suggests both timing and an allusion to classical painting. Elsa Martini is a superbly skilled painter, who depicts her world with poetic intelligence. She employs an academic style, showing off the gestural nature of figure painting. Every stroke reflects a motion, yet everything is precise, with intention. Every element of application is thorough with realistic and painstakingly depicted figures to almost Gerhard Richter-esque, blurred backgrounds. She marries elements of the history of painting within bare square inches of her paintings, but does so seamlessly and effortlessly.  This expert mix of contemporary and classical style, combined with surreal anachronism transport viewers to another time and place while maintaining an air of familiarity. 

 

While nostalgia is present, Elsa’s primary focus is on the unspoken — the silent scenes that carry trauma beneath their calm surface. She gazes through these images to understand how history lives in bodies and behaviors, especially those of women and children, who often remained functional yet invisible within dominant narratives. The exhibition Poison and Elixir brings together works from different periods and geographies. The Happiness of Others – Italy (2018), where the series began, drawing from private archives from the interwar period and World War II, Austria (2018–2025), continuing this research in dialogue with displacement, psychoanalysis, and family history. Albania (2018–ongoing), referring to family archives from the socialist and post-socialist period (1980s–1990s). At centre of the gallery is Jol How a painting – drawing flower installation which functions as a living structure rather than decoration, carrying memory, care, beauty, but also histories of extraction and control as a constellation. The title refers to a recurring concern in her practice: the thin line between what sustains life and what slowly erodes it- socially, emotionally, ecologically, and historically. In dialogue with painting and drawing, it creates an atmosphere that insists on temporality and attention.

 

 

Abhijeet Gondkar

January 2026, Mumbai

 “Poison & Elixir”,

a solo exhibition by Elsa Martini.

Curated by Abhijeet Gondkar, the exhibition unfolds like a quiet walk through memory, where innocence, tenderness, and unease exist side by side, exploring the thin line between beauty and violence, memory and forgetting - where what sustains life may also quietly erode it, much like Poison and Elixir within the same moment.

Elsa Martini is a Vienna-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, multimedia, and site-specific work. Her work engages with memory, social trauma, gender, and the ways personal and collective histories inhabit space. Her works have been exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, biennials, and major art platforms. She is the founder and curator of the NATA International Art Collective.

Exhibition Dates: 31st January – 6th February 2026
Timings: Daily, 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Venue: Nippon Gallery/ 30/32, 2nd Floor, Deval Chambers,
Nana Bhai Lane, Flora Fountain, / Fort, Mumbai – 400001
We look forward to your presence. is the founder and curator of the NATA International Art Collective.