First introduced in February 2025 through the group exhibition Mango Man: Allegories of Political Propositions, curated by Tak Contemporary, Indian artist Pavan Kavitkar now takes center stage at 193 Gallery with his first solo exhibition in France: Vocabularies of a Shifting Landscape.
Pavan Kavitkar’s works are rooted in landscapes shaped by pressure—places marked by constant movement, adjustment, and transformation. The terrains he depicts are neither untouched nor devastated; they are continually altered, measured, divided, and rebuilt through human intervention. As cities expand and forests retreat, rural landscapes are fragmented or absorbed by urban infrastructure, slowly reshaping local ecosystems, social structures, and collective memory. The violence of this new order is not abrupt but unfolds gradually, as an ongoing process. These are not distant extraction sites, but environments we inhabit and inherit. Within them, elements of construction enter into dialogue with nature: scaffolding and tarps, barbed wire cutting through the land, and irrigation systems imposed by intensive agriculture.
Painted in watercolor, gouache, and oil, these scenes draw on techniques deeply rooted in the tradition of Indian miniature painting and the Bengal School of Art, which emerged in 1905 in opposition to colonial academic realism. Through symbolic or surreal compositions, Kavitkar portrays a lush nature—sometimes isolated, paradoxically serene—alongside modernist architectural forms that function as shelters or vantage points for the artist. Without romanticizing nature or condemning construction, Pavan Kavitkar presents the land he has lived with—its gestures, rituals, and accumulated traces—giving form to the complex ways territory is imagined and experienced in an India in perpetual transformation.
Pavan has already exhibited with major galleries in India such as Sakshi Gallery and Gallery Art & Charlie in Mumbai, and his presence in Paris continues to grow, marking this as his third exhibition in the city. His work is part of significant institutional and private collections, including the Reserve Bank of India (Kolkata), the Times of India (Mumbai), and the Reliance Group, and he is a recipient of the Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation Award (2021) and the Khoj Support Grant, New Delhi (2020).
The exhibition will be on view until 18 April 2026.
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