Kuldeep Singh: Lucid Body Elixir Terrain

Victoria Miro Projects is delighted to present Lucid Body Elixir Terrain by New York-based Indian artist Kuldeep Singh. This is the eleventh project in an ongoing series of presentations by invited international artists. The exhibition is accompanied by new writing by curator and art historian Rattanamol Singh Johal.

Drawing on the late medieval and early modern Indian raagmala tradition – where music, image and narrative reach representational synthesis – Lucid Body Elixir Terrain considers how various historical forms of creative expression can be re-approached through contemporary artistic language. Rattanamol Singh Johal remarks, ‘Singh’s paintings dwell on this complex and varied tradition, remaking it through an embodied praxis and alternative imagination of its structuring relationships, interactions and forms.’

As a painter and trained Odissi dancer, Singh approaches painting holistically, allowing sound and movement to inform his compositions. Working with the themes and associations of specific classical raags, or melodic frameworks for improvisation, Singh translates states of devotion, reverie, introspection and longing into painterly form. Music, arranged specifically for this exhibition by Tanveer Singh Sapra and audible when viewing the works, transforms his presentation into an immersive sensory environment.

Singh draws viewers into fields of vibrant pigment that pulse with musicality, describing colour as ‘sonorous, emotional and molecular.’ Reimagining the body as landscape, the artist presents figures that signify mood and sensation rather than specific narratives. His process is both physical and intuitive: as Singh Johal notes, ‘He moistens the surface of the canvas before applying paint quickly, adjusting viscosities, dabbing and smearing until the pigment covers the surface, becoming denser and more saturated with each layer.’ Moving fluidly between figuration and abstraction, this layered approach intensifies the chromatic depth of the works, creating rich worlds in which lovers, mystics, thinkers and healers exist as fresh, ever radiant spirits.