Sayanee Sarkar’s practice, as a visual artist based in Vadodara, India, explores the tension between figuration and abstraction, often drawing from gestures of the body in private, intimate spaces. Working primarily with painting and drawing, Sarkar uses repetition, stain, and spontaneous mark-making on raw canvas and wood to investigate how visual cues can reveal as well as obscure meaning.
Her practice sits at the edge of representation, where the body dissolves into space and perception becomes unstable. Each painting begins in a kind of collapse — of form, of thought, of process — and slowly rebuilds itself through instinct. She keeps returning to questions about the material presence of painting and the viewer’s perception, how private gestures can be misread as something erotic, and how ambiguity shapes the way we interpret the body and its surrounding space.
Sarkar’s work is often driven by the use of found and personal imagery, be it from social media, film stills, or photographs taken by herself. Evolving through a chaotic painterly process invested with mark-making, these second-hand references blur figure and space into a single mass with resonant edges and exposed canvas, inviting myriad readings.
