LONDON.- Victoria Miro Projects recently presented Lucid Body Elixir Terrain, a new body of work by the New York-based Indian artist Kuldeep Singh. The exhibition marked the eleventh installment in the gallery’s ongoing series of presentations dedicated to invited international artists and is accompanied by newly commissioned writing by curator and art historian Rattanamol Singh Johal.
Singh’s practice operates at the intersection of painting, sound, and embodied movement, offering a distinct and evolving visual language that draws from, yet fundamentally reconfigures, the historical Indian raagmala tradition. Rooted in late medieval and early modern systems where music, image, and poetic narrative converge, raagmala painting has long functioned as a synesthetic form. Singh extends this lineage into the present, not through revival, but through a rigorous process of transformation that repositions its logic within a contemporary, cross-sensory framework.
As Johal notes in the accompanying text, the artist’s paintings do not simply reference tradition but “remake it through an embodied praxis and alternative imagination of its structuring relationships.” This act of reconfiguration is central to Singh’s contribution: rather than preserving inherited visual codes, he dissolves their fixed meanings and reconstructs them through gesture, materiality, and affect.
Trained as both a painter and an Odissi dancer, Singh approaches the canvas as a site of lived experience. Movement, rhythm, and breath are not metaphors within the work but generative forces that shape its formal outcomes. Each painting is informed by specific classical raags, or melodic frameworks, which guide the emotional and atmospheric register of the composition. States such as devotion, longing, reverie, and introspection are translated into chromatic fields that oscillate between figuration and abstraction.
For Lucid Body Elixir Terrain, this synthesis extended beyond the visual. Music composed by Tanveer Singh Sapra accompanies the exhibition, creating an immersive environment in which sound and image operate as interdependent elements. The result was not a conventional exhibition but a multi-sensory field, where the viewer encountered painting as an experience unfolding across time, rather than as a static object.
Singh’s material process underscores the originality of his approach. Working on moistened canvases, he applies pigment in rapid, responsive gestures, manipulating viscosity and density through layering, smearing, and absorption. This technique produces surfaces that appear to pulse with internal energy, where color becomes what the artist describes as “sonorous, emotional and molecular.” Through this method, the painted figure dissolves into atmosphere, emerging as a site of sensation rather than representation.
In these works, the body is no longer depicted as a fixed form but as a shifting terrain, one that holds emotional, spiritual, and sensory states simultaneously. Figures, lovers, mystics, thinkers, healers, appear as radiant presences, suspended between material and immaterial realms. This reimagining of the body as both landscape and vibration reflects a broader conceptual shift within Singh’s practice: a move away from narrative specificity toward an expanded, experiential understanding of image-making.
The exhibition at Victoria Miro Projects coincided with a period of sustained institutional visibility for the artist across Europe, following the recent closing of presentations of his work at the National Museum in Oslo, Norway, in the group exhibition Deviant Ornaments, curated by Noor Bhangu, as well as Old Paths, New Heights at Mint Gallery in Munich, Germany. Singh has also exhibited at the Kistefos Museum in Norway and the Brooklyn Museum in the United States, and his work has been presented by internationally recognized galleries, including Chemould CoLab in Mumbai, India, Perrotin and Aicon Gallery in New York. His work is held in the collections of major institutions, including the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, and is further present in private collections across Singapore; New Delhi and Mumbai, India; Cape Town, South Africa; Munich and Leipzig, Germany; and New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle in the United States.
Against this backdrop, Lucid Body Elixir Terrain, which closed on March 31, consolidated Singh’s singular and rigorously crafted artistic language, not simply revisiting the past but reshaping it, drawing from historical forms to construct a body of work that felt at once inherited and newly formed. The works unfolded with a quiet intensity, where gesture, surface, and symbolism converge into compositions that resisted fixed readings while remaining deeply anchored in cultural memory.
A forthcoming solo exhibition at Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi, scheduled for spring 2027, will mark Singh’s return to India, where a new body of work continues to weave reimagined elements into speculative narratives. Here, queer subjectivity and ecofeminism unfold through a measured interplay between figuration and abstraction, extending the artist’s sustained engagement with history, form, and identity.
By Adana Vincent
04/01/2026
