Parul Sharma trained as a painter at the College of Art, New Delhi, where she also completed her MFA. Her practice investigates the psychological and physical dimensions of urban architecture, asking how the built environment mediates movement, perception, freedom, and bodily experience. Rooted in a sustained engagement with Delhi’s architectural fabric, she works through geometric abstraction and material experimentation to interrogate the politics of spatial inhabitation, particularly as shaped by gender.

The work began on the move. Portraits sketched on bus rides through Delhi’s in-between spaces gradually gave way to a different kind of attention: to how a corridor, a façade, a slant of afternoon light carries an entire atmosphere. In 2018, during a large-scale mural project, she encountered the familiar refrain that women could not handle work at this scale, could not labour across height and surface, could not command space the way murals demand. The following year, she began working directly on her studio walls. The pigment crossed thresholds, climbed toward the ceiling, reached the edges of adjacent studios. The gesture was also metaphorical: a freedom from boundaries that society had imposed elsewhere, an opening of space that had not been granted. The wall, as she puts it, became a direction.

Her drawings, pop-up books, and murals (Breathing Space I, Mapping of the Sky, Sky is Orange, Where Does the Sunlight Meet, A Moment) refuse to sit inside a frame; they construct their own architecture. Lines are gestural, restless, carrying the movement of the body that made them. More recent work pushes toward the fully sensory: Memory of Dust incorporates collected dust from her studio into the visual field itself, and current experiments attempt to render temperature visible, asking how two adjacent rooms separated by a single wall can feel atmospherically different.

If there is a figure in this work, it is the flâneuse, implied rather than depicted, moving through a city that does not extend itself equally to everyone, insisting on her right to notice it, occupy it, and push a line of pigment across it until it arrives somewhere it was not supposed to reach.

Selected exhibitions: Curated group show, 1X1 Art Gallery, Dubai (selected as the only emerging artist in a programme of senior South Asian practitioners). Selected fairs: India Art Fair, 2022, 2024 and 2026; Art Mumbai, 2025. Selected residencies: FRISE Künstlerhaus, Hamburg; Plaksha University, Mohali. Selected collections: Boston Consulting Group (permanent collection); Plaksha University, Mohali (permanent collection).