Art Alive Gallery will present Paresh Maity: Luminous Terrains, a major solo exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Bikaner House, New Delhi. The show opens with a preview and book launch on Saturday, 28 February 2026, and will remain on view at CCA, Bikaner House, until 10 March 2026.
Conceived as a large-scale public exhibition, Luminous Terrains revisits the ecology and visual diversity of landscapes across India, Venice and France through Maity’s evolving painterly language. The exhibition brings together oils, acrylics and drawings that move between the serenity of Dal Lake in Srinagar, Venetian lagoons, the river Ganga at Varanasi, the French Riviera, the deserts and chromatic intensity of Rajasthan, and the rugged terrain of Madhya Pradesh.
Themes and curatorial focus
The body of work is framed as a visual diary of Maity’s travels and his long-standing engagement with nature as both subject and spiritual anchor. Landscapes painted and repainted over decades become sites where he probes the shifting relationship between light, colour, atmosphere and memory rather than straightforward topographical description.
The exhibition also explicitly acknowledges the legacy of European modernism, with Maity building on the foundations of artists such as Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Renoir and Pissarro, while inflecting their concerns with an Indian understanding of light and climatic conditions. In the Venice and South of France canvases, light appears crisp and translucent, while in the Indian works it takes on a thicker, dust-filtered intensity that is almost tactile.
Artist background
Born in Tamluk, West Bengal in 1965, Paresh Maity is regarded as one of India’s most prolific contemporary artists, with dozens of solo exhibitions over nearly four decades across India and abroad. Trained at the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata, and the College of Art, New Delhi, he has worked across watercolour, oil and acrylic painting, mixed media, sculpture, installation and photography.
Maity is widely known for his landscapes and large-scale commissions, including the approximately 850-foot mural Indian Odyssey at the international terminal of Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi, one of the longest paintings in the world. His work is represented in major public collections such as the British Museum, the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, and the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and he received the Padma Shri in 2014.
Art Alive Gallery
Founded in 2001, Art Alive Gallery is a New Delhi–based contemporary art gallery that presents curated exhibitions, retrospectives and publications focused on modern and contemporary Indian art. Led by founder-director Sunaina Anand, the gallery has built a strong publishing wing and international exhibition programme, positioning itself as a key platform for Indian artists in India and abroad.
The gallery has a long association with Maity and houses one of the largest collections of his paintings and sculptures among Indian galleries. Luminous Terrains also marks a moment of reflection for the gallery as it completes 25 years in the art fraternity, aligning the artist’s ongoing journey with a milestone in the institution’s own history.
Publication and accompanying book
The preview of Luminous Terrains will coincide with the launch of a new publication on Paresh Maity, featuring contributions by eminent authors Partha Mitter and Kishore Singh. Positioned alongside the exhibition, the book situates Maity’s practice within broader art-historical lineages and underscores how his handling of light, movement and colour has developed through sustained travel and close observation of different geographies.
Together, the exhibition and publication present Luminous Terrains as both a continuation of Maity’s longstanding exploration of landscape and a focused chapter in his post-Infinite Light trajectory at Bikaner House, foregrounding nature, spirituality and cross-cultural movement as core to his visual language.
Cover image: Paresh Maity | Morning In Prayag | Image credit: Art Alive Gallery
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
