Project 88 is pleased to present the works of muralist and painter Anpu Varkey in her first solo show at the gallery, The Shape of a Pause. The Bangalore based artist will be displaying a large-scale mural and a selection of oil paintings on canvas.
Over the past fifteen years, Anpu Varkey’s practice has unfolded through a sustained engagement with urban, site-responsive modes of mark-making. This new exhibition operates as an extension and reframing of that trajectory, translating her longstanding gestural vocabulary into the enclosed, durational space of the studio. The works presented here, produced over the past three years, articulate a continuity between exterior intervention and interior reflection.
The paintings situate themselves within micro-temporal zones of solitude and self-attunement. Here, the act of painting functions simultaneously as subject, methodology, and perceptual inquiry, oscillating between gesture, emergent form, and the simulated conditions of painterly technique. A calibrated melancholia moves throughout the surfaces, manifesting not as affective excess but as a subtle, low-frequency register of dormancy and introspection.
Whether positioned within interior or exterior environments, the figures appear suspended within provisional states of stillness. Yet the material language that constitutes them remains highly active: rapid strokes undone or erased, gravitational drips tracing the logic of their own descent, and dry, broken marks that index urgency while producing a paradoxical immobility. Motion becomes sedimented into the very condition of stillness.