RADHIKA KHIMJI

Employing a range of processes that are central to her works, including photographic transfers from personal archives, collage, painting, stitching and drawing, Khimji pushes the edges of her practice. Her ongoing interests in expanding the possibilities of thinking through shapes, geometry, and the body in relation to landscapes are often the point of departure in the works on view. Abstracted landscape forms seem ensconced within innumerable repeated dots and oblong shapes, an act that makes the surface of her works tactile and acutely textured. Khimji has mentioned of this motif: ‘I’ve been fascinated with watching a mark cover up an area to veil and reveal it at the same time. There’s a physical hovering which feels like an energy zone.’

Khimji’s works reveal a delicate tension between the attributes of sharp corners and soft curves, a body and a drape, a bust and macrocosm. The layered surfaces of the works become modes to traverse multiple terrains of vastness and emptiness – alluding to unknown places, cosmic spheres and secret inner worlds. She develops ways of working informed by the physicality and materiality of making that deconstructs, evades and erases constructions of formulated identities. As a result, the works slip in and out of recognition as images and definitions are turned inside out, often serving as a metaphor for the transitory and fragmented state of the body. Khimji pursues a sense of suspended movement of form while simultaneously anchoring her practice in image making and expanding the scope of view in Cutting Into Space.

Radhika Khimji (b.1979 in Muscat, Oman, lives and works in London, United Kingdom) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and holds an MA in Art History from University College London. Select solo exhibitions include Adorning Shadows at Experimenter, Kolkata, 2021, Shift at Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, 2019, On the Cusp at Stal Gallery, Muscat, 2018 and Becoming Landscape at Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna, 2017. Select group exhibitions include the Oman National Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Drawing Biennial at Drawing Room, London, 2021 and the 6th Marrakech Biennale, Not New Now, Marrakech, 2016.