Seema Kohli's practice has grown over four decades, moving from drawing and painting into sculpture, installation, video, and performance. She studied Philosophy at Miranda House (University of Delhi) and earned a Diploma in Applied Arts from South Delhi Polytechnic (1983), a foundation that shaped her command over image-making, material detail, and symbol systems.
1. 1980s–Early 1990s (Formation Years)
After her academic training, Kohli's early professional years built the discipline of daily studio practice and an interest in how images carry inner states, memory, and archetype. Profiles and interviews from later years consistently position her as an artist whose language was developing outside a single-medium identity, with an early emphasis on drawing and a gradual pull toward immersive, multi-sensory expression.
2. Mid-1990s–Early 2000s
A key milestone is her training period at Triveni Kala Sangam under artist Rameshwar Broota, which sits at the beginning of her visible public exhibition trajectory. Her earliest listed solo exhibitions appear from 1998 onward, including The Quest (AIFACS, New Delhi, 1998), followed by multiple presentations in 1999–2004.
3. 2002–2007: "The Golden Womb/Hiranyagarbha" Years
The early 2000s consolidated the series that became one of her most cited explorations: The Golden Womb / Hiranyagarbha. Her practice documents repeated solo iterations of this body of work across New Delhi (2002, 2004), Singapore (2001), London (2006), and Hyderabad (2007), signalling how this concept and iconography became a recognisable spine of her practice.
4. 2007–2011: Awards and the Move Into Video/Expanded Media.
Kohli received the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award for Women (2007), followed by the Gold Medal at the Florence Biennale (2009) for her two-channel video installation Swayamsiddha and the Young FICCI Ladies Organization Women Achiever's Award (2010). This period marks her credibility not only as a painterly practitioner but as an artist working confidently across formats.
5. 2014–2017: Biennale-linked Visibility and Large thematic Exhibitions.
Her CV records Unending Dance of Light (Raksh e Shams) as a collateral event at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014), alongside a substantial international exhibition footprint including Venice Biennale collateral contexts (Personal Structures, Venice, 2015) and further solo presentations like Golden Womb – Dawn of Time (Hyderabad, 2017). These years show the shift from series-led painting into a broader cosmology of image, ritual, and environment.
6. 2018–2024: Mature Multi-medium Language and Institution-facing Scale.
Kohli's later solos demonstrate thematic continuity with new formal directions: What A Body Remembers (Tao Art Gallery, 2018) and When The Moon is Nine Months Full (Tao Art Gallery, 2024) are positioned as turning points, with the 2024 show explicitly described as a shift toward the gendered nature of care labour and an expanded "self" in her practice.
7. 2025–2026: Continued Institutional Presence and International Expansion.
In late 2025, she returned to Chennai with Where Earth Writes Upon the Sky (Lalit Kala Akademi), featuring painting, sculpture, video, performance, and installation. In 2026, Samsara & Metamorphosis: The Mystical World of Seema Kohli was her first solo exhibition in the United States (Palo Alto, Feb 27–Mar 1, 2026), signalling an ongoing international arc rather than a retrospective plateau.