The Mighty Chair
This is as bracing a show as we have come to expect from Prashalee Gaikwad, each of her paintings is charged with the task of bringing together opposing forces in a world where art is equally figurative and abstract. If the paintings prove they are something much more than pastiche, it is owing to further dialectic: that the paintings be handsomely realized yet left unsettled and unsettling. How we know this is immediately apparent in an overview of the exhibition where each painting flaunts its singularity in striking contrast with shows commonly seen wherein in a bid to convince the viewer of the career, all works on display are merely alike. Consistency is the goal when it comes to Prashalee so much as inner stylistic coherence and purpose.
The Mighty Chair (all works, 2025) is architecturally disposed, yet freely so. Winding elements, cat and volumetric spaces are conjoined in an unforced way to maintain a sense of perpetual experiment and exploration, which stimulate inventiveness in relating objects in space. Universally known to induce spatial thought and so a child’s portal into adult worlds, this concrete genealogy is very evident in Prashalee’s paintings devoted to the topic of the studio. Geometric and volumetric figures conjoined in a kind of mental space of creative learning. In the current series of deliberately disparate canvases, The Mighty Chair has all attributes of creative learning through mental alertness. But as cerebral as this may sound, when viewed up close the painting is typical of the artist’s sensitized skill.
Prashalee’s visual vocabulary derives from abstract universal elements that lend themselves to being read as signs, elements she freely permutates. Hanging together in the works are shapes in outline which create interference such that interior spaces proliferate. Permutations and combinations yield rich figure-ground ambiguities. The artist has fused the spatial choices in a flattened quasi-expressionist picture plane. Through such revision, Prashalee has set herself an ambitious program of learning that also extends to embedded meaning and reference adequate to the ambiguities, not so innocent, neither as common motifs nor as universal elements set out in neutrality. Simple clarity of figural elements in a straightforward-seeming planar space in this painting gives off an air of innocence, but this assumption is soon dispelled by consideration of its title. Thanks to reworking the givens of composition, however, the artist leaves us with a difficulty. As spatiality involves social intensity stemming from relative geographical positions, the work induces dynamic intensities through transfigured compositions. We cannot be the facile decoders of signs.
Abhijeet Gondkar
October 2025, Mumbai
✨ The Mighty Chair ✨
Recent Works by PRASHALEE GAIKWAD
📍 Nippon Gallery
Preview: 9th October 2025 · 5:30 pm onwards
Exhibition Dates: 10th – 28th October 2025
Timings: 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Curated by: Abhijeet Gondkar
🌙 Opening Night
Thursday, 9th October 2025
📌 Address:
Nippon Gallery
30/32, 2nd Floor, Deval Chambers
Nana Bhai Lane, Flora Fountain
Fort, Mumbai – 400 001
