Krishi Shah (b.2000)
My practice engages the sublime through landscape, exploring moments where the scale and intensity of the natural world dissolve the boundaries of the self and create the eternal Tao. These works move between sky, earth, and atmosphere, where elements meet, shift, and unfold as windswept fields of rhythm, air, and luminosity. The horizon becomes a threshold of tension, a site of push and pull, where elements cross, merge, and resist containment. In this meeting of elements, a quiet grandeur emerges, producing an inner stillness where one becomes both immersed, insignificant and detached, held within a continuous movement that feels at once alive and transient.
I work with watercolour and natural pigments on mulmul (woven wind), a fine muslin whose translucency allows light and air to permeate the surface. Layered colours form breathing fields that shift with the viewer’s presence. Marks become a process of emergence and disappearance, where forms hover between visibility and dissolution creating a formless inexhaustible source of Tao, that dissolves the ego.
Raised in Malabar Hill, Mumbai, my practice is shaped by atmospheric, ecological, and philosophical conditions of my upbringing. The monsoon and its cyclical transformations, where rain, wind, and atmosphere create moments of renewal. Grounded in Jain philosophy, particularly ahimsa (non-violence), aparigraha (non-possession), vairagya (detachment) and reverence for unseen life in every droplet of water. My approach reflects a sensitivity to interdependence, fragility, and non-possession, extending into both material and method. These experiences cultivated an early understanding of renewal, surrender, and attentive perception.This tension between desire and necessity, comfort and consequence, informs my inquiry into what it truly means to grow or evolve.
Within a world driven by speed and accumulation, my work reflects on the tension between constructed human desire and the larger forces that exceed it. Shifting from a human-centred to a planetary lens, the paintings propose attunement over control, where detachment becomes a way of reconnecting with the elemental rhythms of the world.
Education
MA, Painting, Royal College of Art, London, UK (2025-26)
BFA, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, USA. (2018-22)