Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery kicked off the year with a solo show by artist Chameli Ramachandran, titled ‘Flowers Bloom, Flowers Wither Away, Flowers Bloom Again’, on view at their modern gallery space.

Ramachandran, whose art was honed by masters such as Benodebehari Mukherjee and Ramkinkar Baij and who studied at Visva- Bharati Santiniketan, is heavily influenced by nature in her art practice. In a unique confluence of Chinese meditative practices and inspiration from the lush flora of Bengal, the Delhi-based artist’s work is almost an obeisance to the beauty of nature.

For her body of work on view at this present exhibition, Ramachandran draws from her existing practice of repeated strokes as she merges the structural outline of the flowers with their spiritual connotations and also views their life-cycles as metaphors of life and death.

“Chameli renders her flowers with deft brushwork and elegant personas, and captures both their life-brimming potential and fallen obscurities with the same attention. While she usually paints from life, in this series of work Chameli also newly relies on memory to experiment with form, especially the sthalapadmas on her terrace in Delhi that were just about to bloom when the Ramachandrans left the city for a long sojourn to Mumbai towards the end of last year, where the fullness of the heavy, multi-petalled flowers kept haunting her, thus working in subjective exaggerations for the sake of storytelling. Her list of protagonists is long, including orchids, sthalapadma (Hibiscus mutabilis), simul (silk cotton), and various kinds of lilies, chrysanthemums, carnations and crotons”, reads the gallery’s curatorial note for the exhibition.

The physical exhibition is on till February 18 and can be viewed online too.