Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

Current show

Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke’s unique position has evolved over the past 30 years. Usha Mirchandani, who had a career in advertising in New York during the 1970s, experienced art up close in some of its most radical and formative moments. Mirchandani returned to Bombay in the mid-eighties, where she established an art consultancy, joined later by her daughter Ranjana.

In Berlin from 1997 to 2003, Ranjana Steinruecke ran a gallery introducing art from India in the new German capital, through iconic exhibitions by Atul Dodiya, Jogen Chowdhury and Bhupen Khakhar among other artists. The gallery curated and presented “The Artist Lives and Works”, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which showed for the first time in Berlin the work of Shilpa Gupta, N.S. Harsha and Jitish Kallat among other young contemporaries from India.

In 2006, the gallery opened in Mumbai with the intention to discover and nurture new and potent positions in painting that were emerging in India. Today, the gallery represents some of the country’s most sought-after painters including Ratheesh T., Sosa Joseph, Siji Krishnan, Aji V.N. and Abir Karmakar who explore a range of personal and political subjects through highly individualised approaches. The program includes as well some of the foremost practitioners of collage, sculpture and photography in India, such as C.K. Rajan, Benitha Perciyal and Gauri Gill. In 2022, the gallery moved its location to a larger space in Mumbai’s heritage district, Ballard Estate, where it continues to present some of the city’s finest exhibitions.

Current show:

Variations on a Tide

AJI VN

23 May to 26 July 2025

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The paintings and drawings of Aji VN serve as visual chronographs marking his journeys across diurnal and transcendental time, but also as compasses exploring the possibilities of the world. I am struck by how the same painted scene folds many orders of time in states of intimacy and reliance—the geological time of rocks, the lifespan of foliage which will leave its trace on the rocks, the sea as the most ancient, ancestral matter we know, the celestial formations dotted above. The hours of light and darkness, the view of horizon, verdant landscapes—the paintings condense the span of days, months, years within their frame, sedimenting layers of paint as chapters of accumulated hours spent at the ever-renewing shoreline or gazing from the window of a temporary studio.

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Reflexive to the vastness of these paintings is the furtive intensity of drawings that relay an inhabited moment with a sense of immediacy. Here, we encounter the texture of terraqueous sites, boulders as capsules of deep time, and explorations of finite moments. Shifting between the unknowable and intimately held, there are small portraits of Aji’s daughter, often with her gaze turned elsewhere or presented in an oblique profile that retains the quality of immersion and inwardness of the natural world—at once with us and somewhere beyond.

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Arushi Vats

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Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke

Ballard Estate

info@galeriems.com

022-35098262