Veteran Mumbai-based artist Vishakha Apte presents Mapped by Tide and Time, a solo exhibition spanning painting, printmaking, paper constructions, and ceramics, opening in Mumbai this April before travelling to New Delhi.
About the Exhibition
Mapped by Tide and Time, curated by Ina Puri, opens at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai from 14th to 20th April 2026, and travels to Gallery Ragini, New Delhi from 25th April to 30th May 2026. The exhibition brings together works from across more than three decades of Apte’s practice, offering a comprehensive survey of an artist who has consistently chosen depth over spectacle.
Rather than presenting a linear retrospective, the show unfolds as a continuum — tracing how Apte’s engagement with material has evolved from restrained early printmaking to layered, tactile surfaces, sculptural paper works, and ceramic forms that occupy space with quiet insistence.
About the Vishakha Apte
Vishakha Apte (b. 1966, Nashik) graduated from Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai in 1987. A recipient of honours at the National Exhibition, New Delhi, and fellowships from the Department of Culture, Government of India, Apte has represented India at international biennials and triennials in Japan, China, Poland, and India.
Her works are held in significant public collections including the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Lalit Kala Akademi; Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal; and international institutions such as the Ostrobothnian Museum, Finland, and the Maulana Azad Centre for Indian Culture, Cairo.
Artist Practice
Apte’s practice is process-led, shaped as much by material constraints and temporal rhythms as by formal inquiry. Her use of recycled paper — drawn from fragments of everyday textual life — introduces both an ecological awareness and a poetic sensibility, transforming the ephemeral into something durably present. In her ceramic works, form, weight, and colour converge to produce structures that appear to grow and gather, occupying space with a subtle but insistent physicality.
Central to Apte’s visual language is a reimagining of figuration — not as an idealised or complete body, but as fragment, trace, and suggestion. Motifs such as feet and limbs serve as anchors of presence, registering balance and the quiet act of simply being. The everyday objects surrounding these forms — tools, surfaces, interior structures — take on an almost animate quality, blurring the boundary between subject and environment.
Curatorial Vision
Curated by Ina Puri, Mapped by Tide and Time traces a movement from solitude toward relation, from isolated forms to structures that suggest connection and co-presence. “Apte’s practice ultimately proposes a quiet redefinition of figuration,” Puri notes. “The body in her work is not spectacular — it is sensed through traces, textures, and weights that speak of persistence rather than display.”
Gallerist Nidhi Jyoti Jain, who has long championed Apte’s work, describes the experience of encountering it as one requiring patience and attentiveness. “Her work does not seek spectacle; instead, it invites a slower, more attentive encounter, where form emerges through a sustained engagement with material, memory, and lived experience,” she says.
Exhibition Details
Mapped by Tide and Time: A Solo Exhibition of Works by Vishakha Apte
Curated by Ina Puri
Mumbai
Jehangir Art Gallery, Kala Ghoda, Fort
14th – 20th April 2026
Timings: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM
New Delhi
Gallery Ragini, F 208, Ground Floor, Lado Sarai
25th April – 30th May 2026
Timings: 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM
This article has been created from the press kit shared with Abir Pothi. For press releases and related queries, write to editor@abirpothi.com.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
