Deepa Shyam’s first solo exhibition, Circular Scatter — गर्रा (Garra), curated by Georgina Maddox, has opened at Kalamkaar Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi, on 29 October 2026 and remains on view until 3 November. The opening was graced by Ashok Vajpeyi as Guest of Honour.
A debut with a lineage
Shyam is the wife of Bhajju Shyam, one of the most recognised contemporary Gond-Pardhan artists, and her practice has developed within a shared world of Gond stories, motifs and ways of seeing. Yet Circular Scatter is not framed as an extension of Bhajju Shyam’s practice; it is a deliberate introduction to Deepa Shyam as an artist with her own grammar, rhythms and concerns.
Gond art has often been discussed through its most visible male practitioners, even as women in artistic families have contributed to its transmission, production and everyday visual culture. The exhibition therefore carries an institutional significance: it asks viewers to encounter Deepa Shyam as the author of a distinct body of work.
Geometry as memory
The show’s central proposition is geometry—not as cold formalism, but as a language of lived experience. Circles, dots, dashes, lines and angular configurations become the elementary units from which Shyam builds dense, animated compositions.
Her triangles and angular forms recall the ox-cart and the homestead, while repeated dots and lines accumulate into fields of movement. The everyday is neither illustrated literally nor dissolved entirely into abstraction; it is translated into signs that retain their connection to place, labour, dwelling and memory.
The circle is the exhibition’s most potent motif. It may suggest the sun or moon, a seed, an eye, a dwelling or the universe—forms that connect cultivation, birth, habitation and renewal. In Gond cosmologies, where human, animal, vegetal and celestial life are understood as interlinked, the circle becomes more than a shape: it becomes a model of continuity.
From tradition, not away from it
Shyam’s work emerges from Gond art’s living tradition of storytelling, in which imagery and knowledge are passed through generations and renewed through community, observation and participation. Her paintings use that inherited vocabulary, but they do not merely reproduce it.
The result is a practice that sits between figuration and abstraction. Familiar subjects—animals, forests, celestial bodies, homes and elements of daily life—are distilled into pattern, repetition and rhythm. The viewer is invited to look closely, because the paintings reward attention: a dot becomes a line, a line becomes a pattern, and patterns gather into larger structures that seem to breathe.
This is where the exhibition’s title becomes especially apt. Garra, or scatter, suggests dispersal—but in Shyam’s hands, scattering is not disorder. It is a method of world-making, where small marks find their place within a larger, ordered universe.
Why this show matters
For audiences following contemporary Indian art, Circular Scatter arrives at a moment when Gond art is increasingly recognised as a contemporary practice rather than an ethnographic category. Artists such as Bhajju Shyam have transformed inherited tribal motifs into modern visual languages rooted in Gond myths, folktales and natural rhythms.
Deepa Shyam’s debut adds an important voice to that conversation. Her work demonstrates that innovation within a traditional practice need not mean rupture from it. Instead, it can mean deepening the tradition—finding new formal possibilities within inherited signs while keeping their cultural and emotional charge intact.
Exhibition details
- Exhibition: Circular Scatter — गर्रा (Garra), a solo exhibition by Deepa Shyam
- Curator: Georgina Maddox
- Guest of Honour: Ashok Vajpeyi
- Opening: Thursday, 29 October 2026, 6:00 pm; open to all, with the artist and curator present
- On view: 29 October–3 November 2026
- Timings: 11 am–7 pm
- Venue: Kalamkaar Gallery, Bikaner House, Pandara Road, India Gate Circle, New Delhi 110003
In Shyam’s paintings, the dot becomes a beginning, the line a journey, the triangle a dwelling and the circle a world.
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