Sujata Achrekar

"Sujata Achrekar’s paintings do not ask to be understood. They ask to be felt. Her canvases carry the hush of an inward gaze, the weight of silence, and the quiet magnetism of figures who seem to listen more than they speak. At first glance, it is the faces that draw you in — hypnotic, still, sometimes mournful. And then it is the texture, the grain, the layering — like thoughts emerging, retreating, surfacing again. Her work, though rooted in figuration, is far from illustrative. It is a conversation between form and formlessness, body and spirit, language and silence. Her approach to figuration is spare but deliberate. She places her central figure with reverence — always alone, always poised somewhere between the seen and the sensed. There is no performance in these bodies. They are vessels of thought. Carriers of seeking. One of her most compelling bodies of work is the Brahmin Brahmachari series — a procession of boys with tonsured heads, clad in ritual white, suspended in states of silent introspection. These are not portraits. They are archetypes of the seeker. The Sanskrit texts that float around them are not sermons but atmospheres — evoking a sacredness that is experiential rather than instructional. Crucially, religion is not Achrekar’s subject. Her work resists institutional doctrine. What she pursues instead is spirituality — unstructured, fluid, deeply personal. Her figures are mid-thought, mid-prayer, mid-wondering. They do not know. They are simply present. While Achrekar’s visual language is rooted in Indian classical motifs, her spirit is contemporary. She draws from the textures of old texts, the repetition of ritual, the intimacy of inner dialogue. The urban landscape she lives in does not dull her introspection — it intensifies it. Mumbai, with all its noise, becomes a backdrop for her contemplative stillness."