KM. KHUSHBOO

KM Khushboo (b. Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh) trained as a painter first at the Faculty of Visual Arts, Banaras Hindu University, then on the MFA programme at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda before moving decisively into printmaking. Etching, dry point and woodcut: slow, historically loaded, hand-intensive techniques that her generation rarely chooses. Among her contemporaries, this commitment makes her unusual; among her elders, it places her in a serious lineage.

Her work is a philosophical investigation into the tension between material impermanence and the persistence of death as an ultimate truth. The practice traces back to dawn hours sketching at the Manikarnika Ghat in Varanasi, where she watched cremation fires return bodies to their elements - an early lesson that creation and dissolution are the same gesture, merely reversed. Later readings of the Bhagavad Gita and of Kabir's dohas reinforced this view: form thinning into formlessness, image into resonance, the mark on the plate behaving the way a chant does, gaining meaning through repetition.

Recent prints make the shift explicit. The figure has receded; what remains is the elemental mud, water, fire. Breath Made Visible dissolves the body into a miasma of red mist; Padmavyuh, a quadriptych, takes the Mahabharata's spiral military formation and turns it, lotus-like, into a meditation on entry and exit. The curator of her recent solo Everything I Waited To Forget describes this register as "a spiritual Cubism that fractures perception not to confuse, but to multiply it" many planes of existence gathered onto a single surface.

For an exhibition gathered around craft as contemporary language, Khushboo's dry point plates are exactly the work that should travel: historically aware, technically formidable, and, as our youngest artist, genuinely young.

Selected exhibitions: CIMA Awards Show 2025, Kolkata; Nabh Sparsh, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi & Mumbai; Voices from India, Cincinnati; At Crossroads, Tapi Festival, Surat; Without Cube, Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda; Incept in Baroda, Art Incept, Gurugram.

Awards: Jeram Patel Award, 2024; Manorama Young Printmakers Grant, 2025.