Gallery Threshold’s Abandoned brings together the final body of work by Latika Katt (1948–2025), one of modern Indian sculpture’s most singular voices. On view from July 28 to September 12, 2026, the exhibition feels less like a retrospective gesture than a closing movement: a last, concentrated encounter with an artist who spent her life making stone, bronze, marble and the most unlikely materials answer to feeling, memory and time.
Katt’s work was always rooted in the physical world, but never limited by it. She treated sculpture as a living process, one shaped by growth, decay, erosion and accumulation and her forms often seem to have been discovered rather than simply made. Nature was her constant point of return, but so was the city of Varanasi, where the living and the dead flow through the same current. That duality gives her work its force: it is grounded in observation, yet haunted by impermanence.
A major focus of the exhibition Abandoned is a group of new sculptures shown together in the courtyard, the Abandoned series itself, among Katt’s last works. Cast in bronze from waxes modelled by the artist and mounted within larger stones, they resemble fragments excavated from a forgotten site. They carry the feeling of something buried and recovered, or perhaps something that has simply outlived its original moment and returned in altered form. The effect is archaeological without being literal, as though the sculptures are remnants of a private civilisation built from touch, labour and memory.
Katt was a sculptor who refused the easy separation between material and emotion. Her practice moved across bronze, marble, terracotta, wood, ceramic, cow dung, papier-mâché, drawings and prints, always adapting the medium to the idea rather than the other way around. She carved her own stone, cast her own bronze, and set unlikely substances into unexpected harmony. Even in her most monumental works, there is a sense of intimacy: the artist is always visible in the pressure of the hand, the attention to surface, the stubborn will to make matter hold feeling.
For readers interested in Indian modernism, sculpture, and material-led practice, the exhibition offers a rare chance to encounter Katt’s work in its final and most distilled state. Set within Threshold Art Gallery, the presentation allows her objects to speak with quiet authority: not as monuments to closure, but as things still expanding, still breathing, still in conversation with the world that made them.
Abandoned by Latika Katt
Venue: Threshold Art Gallery, C-221, Sarvodaya Enclave, New Delhi
Dates: July 28 to September 12, 2026
Timings: Monday to Saturday, 11 am to 7 pm; Sunday by appointment
Cover image credit: Threshold Art Gallery
Pari tiwari is a third year english literature student at Delhi University. She is interested in art, Feminism, politics of representation, literature, philosophy, film, and photography.
