A mixed-media, contemporary artist from Mumbai, Akshita Gandhi is making waves in the international art world. She has just completed her twenty fifth and sixth international showings with Gabriel Fine Arts at The Gallery, Alan Baxter, London and “Architect of the Elsewhere” with Gallery Percheé, New York which has garnered international recognition.
Akshita had an innate love for art from a very young age. At three, she was scribbling walls with coloured pens and started to train under various teachers from the age of four. She says it is her mother’s genes that kept her creative juices flowing. With utmost passion, perseverance and dedication she has redefined the image of Indian artists internationally.
Her sixteenth birthday was a special one as she held her first art exhibition in Mumbai! The memories are still fresh and she fondly remembers the support and appreciation her art received back then too. All the proceeds from her exhibition were donated to an Old Age Home and this event encouraged her to steer away from conventional life choices and create a path of her own. Gandhi belongs to a business family but had a strong calling for art and knew early on in life that she wanted to be an artist.
“With strong courage of conviction, you can dream and achieve anything you like,” her father’s constant encouragement enabled her to break social stigmas and chase her dreams. Art is not separate from her existence, she lives and breathes art. Within the white walls of her studio, she experiments with different media and lets her imagination run free giving wings to some of the wildest colour compositions that aspire to leave her viewers flabbergasted.
Akshita has represented India in art fairs and group shows in New York, Milan, Hong Kong, London and during Art Basel Week in Miami (2018, 2019). She has a few solo shows in the pipeline that she is excited about.
As studies suggest, the art world is predominantly dominated by white men. Gandhi has found the challenge exciting and as a woman of colour, she is constantly striving to represent India at every opportunity she can. With her abstract contemporary work in resin, pour paint, ink and acrylics, she has been trying to create her own style and carve a niche for herself. She amalgamates the photographs she takes, with different mediums to create something unique. Gandhi began experimenting with digital art during the 2020 lockdown, trying to push her boundaries, proving that she is not limited by brushes and canvases.
Akshita was told by a renowned Indian curator that the art world was non-inclusive for emerging artists but she kept her persistence alive and has managed to become a brand name internationally. Her favourite artists include Claude Monet and the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti. By merging social, historical, and mythological concepts, her work explores the four dimensional relationship between time and space. Her body immersive installations include Le cirque de la liberté (2020), a mise-en-scene inspired by the circus, and Dare to Break Free (2020), a commission by the Berlin-based music festival Kater Blau.
In the mixed media painting, lightbox, and poetry series ‘Freedom’, she read Banned Books (2019) and she advocates breaking free from patriarchal structures. Using light as a guiding principle, Gandhi’s work speaks to the transformative power of artistic practice. One of her esteemed career highlights include collaboration with Frank DeBourge during New York Fashion Week and the Indian menswear brand Kurtees.
With an important mission to give back to society, Gandhi co-founded the Dua Foundation along with her sister, Priyanka. Dua’s vision is to empower vulnerable members of society by providing a platform for them to exhibit their talents and achieve financial independence.
Her motto is simple – Make a difference. She strongly believes art bridges generations together and we know about history because of art. “We need to create art, it is for posterity.” She envisions a future where she can create experiences that evoke awe. Art is documenting fantasies and realities. Whether 2-D or 3-D, the viewer remembers the experience and thus the artist.
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