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Tuesday, June 9, 2026 |
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| Anoushka Mirchandani explores identity, memory and ancestry at FLAG Art Foundation |
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Anoushka Mirchandani. My Body Was A River Once, 2024. Oil, oil stick, and oil pastel on canvas, 48 x 36 inches (121.9 x 91.4 cm). Courtesy the Artist. Photography by Daniel Greer.
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NEW YORK, NY.- The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce Everyone You Love Lives Here, an exhibition of new work by Anoushka Mirchandani, on view May 27July 31, 2026, on the 10th floor. Bringing together new and recent paintings, the exhibition will trace Mirchandanis development of new and ever-evolving formal strategies for exploring how identity exists in a constant state of flux and formation, of assembly and negotiation. Featuring works from three distinct yet interconnected and on-going series, Everyone You Love Lives Here will situate Mirchandani alongside significant works by Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and Lisa Yuskavage, revealing that her work is part of a historical conversation around womanhood, memory, nature and ancestry.
In Mirchandanis paintings, female figures exist in a liminal space between action and contemplation, between transition and becoming. Rendered with a complex interplay of solid color forms and loosely delineated contours of the body, her figures possess a porous relationship to the space around them, whether that be a domestic interior defined by intricate patterning and detail or an expanse of nature wild and abstract. The tension between her figures interior worlds and the composite quality of their construction expresses a type of subjectivity she understands through her own diasporic experience of being born and raised in Pune, India, before moving to the United States in early adulthood. Having learned how to balance the memory and influence of her upbringing with the expectations of a new society and culture, Mirchandani brings that same sense of discovery and experiment to her work, where a connection to the past is not only maintained, but continuously renewed through its contact with the present. Deeply biographical, Mirchandanis work references her matrilineal history, which she accesses through a family archive of images, ephemera and an oral history of stories and memory.
Everyone You Love Lives Here is organized around three groupings of Mirchandanis work: solitary female figures positioned in transitory spaces, interiors featuring couples and lone figures and selections from her Jungle Paintings series. In the abstract portraits, Mirchandani examines the idea of portraiture itself with female subjects that appear at the threshold separating one space or state of mind from another. Each painting shows a figure at a different state of attention, whether absorbed within or frankly addressing and returning the viewers gaze. Paired with one of Cindy Shermans Film Still imagesa groundbreaking photographic series that examined identity and feminism in the context of mass mediathese paintings provide a contemporary reflection on how ones sense of self changes in response to what surrounds them.
In Mirchandanis interior scenes featuring both couples and solitary figures, the architecture and objects that define domestic space become repositories of emotional connection and psychological tension. While each figure is constructed with a mix of forms both solid and spacious, the rooms they reside within are rendered with exacting detail and specificity, from a wicker chair to a carpet patterned with colorful diamonds, to the ornamentation embedded in the headboard above a mattress where a couple lay with arms intertwined. Placed in conversation with Louise Bourgeois sculpture Couple (2004), which shows two pink fabric figures joined together while suspended within a glass case, Mirchandanis scenes reveal both intimacy and interiority as elaborate constructions.
With her Jungle Paintings,Mirchandani breaks free from the confines of architectural space, replacing the meticulously detailed interiors with lush green expanses of forest, field and water described with fluid and dynamic brushwork. In contrast to the tremulous dispositions of her interior subjects, these female figures invoke the apsaras from South Asian mythology, mystical women born of mist and fog and known for their shape-shifting abilities. Here they coexist, merge and intertwine with landscapes real and imagined to create scenes that evoke a primordial site of belonging. Seen in tandem with Lisa Yuskavages painting Mutualism (2006), which depicts the joining of the female body with a fantastical vision of nature, Mirchandanis Jungle Paintings express both wish and aspiration: they show the female body in a state of reciprocity with nature just as they envision identity being formed in concert with the world rather than in conflict with it.
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