Pankaj Chouhan studied at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, where he completed both his BFA (2012) and MFA (2014), graduating with the first rank in his cohort. His practice is rooted in a single biographical fact: a rural childhood in Nalanda, surrounded by farmland, followed by an early migration to the urban setting of Ranchi that registered as loss before he had the language for it. He has returned to that landscape as a painter would, through the medium and the subject of memory.

Watercolour is his primary medium, chosen for the quick translation it offers between feeling and surface, and worked alongside organic and salvaged materials: sand, ash, sindur, cement, dry pigments, dried flowers and grasses, charcoal. The work is largely non-figurative and quietly atmospheric, returning again and again to farmland, grassland, the field viewed from unseen angles, the village landscape that is in the process of disappearing. The paintings are tranquil; the argument is urgent. Across India, the rural ecosystems Pankaj knew as a child are being replaced at speed by concrete and tower. His landscapes carry the effect of what the Welsh have long called Hiraeth, a longing for a home that is gone or cannot be returned to, named explicitly in his 2024 solo of that title.

For UK and European curators, the work joins a lineage already familiar. The watercolour itself sits in conversation with the British landscape tradition that runs from J.M.W. Turner through John Sell Cotman to the present. The conceptual frame, the ecological grief for a transformed home, is the affect philosophers have begun to call solastalgia, a registered subject in contemporary climate-art programming from the Hayward to MUDAM. Recent works such as Left Behind VI and Remnants at Paarwaha push the practice toward geometric abstraction, what the artist calls “the surreal aesthetic in landscape,” extending the lineage forward without abandoning the underlying claim. For an exhibition gathered around craft as contemporary language, Pankaj brings the quiet elegy: watercolour as memory medium, landscape as inheritance, painting as the place where what is being lost is held briefly visible.

Recent solo: Hiraeth, presented by Art Incept, 2024. Selected residencies: Art in Residence, Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany, New Delhi, 2025; Artist in Residence, Centre of Excellence in Art, The Doon School, 2025. Selected institutional and international presentations: India Art, Architecture & Design Biennale, Red Fort, New Delhi, 2023; 60th National Exhibition of Art, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 2019; Busan International Art Fair, South Korea, 2017. Selected awards: Karnataka State Merit Award, Prafulla Dahanukar Art Foundation, 2017 and 2018; 1st Prize, On-the-Spot Painting Competition, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, 2013; Camel Art Foundation Award, 2012; First Rank Scholarship, Jamia Millia Islamia, 2009–2013. Selected collections: University of Oxford; The Gujral Foundation; Boston Consulting Group; Plaksha University, Mohali; Kumar Mangalam Birla; Pankaj Kher; Vivek Kumar; Shabir Santosh.