Himani Gupta, a London-based Indian artist, explores themes of place, ecology, and migration through her evocative paintings and drawings. Her work engages through a deeply personal and embodied lens, referencing art history, film, urban theory, mythology, memory, storytelling, and personal archives.
Her layered compositions, led by both imagination and observation, build an artistic language of colour, form and mark-making. These elements form the foundations of her paintings, reflect how we navigate the world, both physically and culturally. Gupta’s process is intuitive and tactile, involving acts of excavating, mixing, scraping and assembling. Each layer engages with landscapes, maps, and bodies, with a focus on spaces and relationships between objects.
Informed by her academic background, including a Masters in Urban Planning and Real Estate from The Bartlett, UCL, Gupta’s approach is self-taught, grounded in experience and collaboration. She has also completed a drawing program at the Royal Drawing School in London and recently was an artist-in-residence at Dumfries House in Scotland, awarded to her by the Royal Drawing School. She is currently on the TURPS offsite program for painters for 2024-25.
A part of her artistic practice is also dedicated to socially engaged projects and academic collaborations. Some of these include projects and talks in the area of medical humanities, access to justice, political borders and borderlands, and working with children.
“I am interested in observing the movement of people through the eco-systems they create and occupy, and recording these experiences. This consists of built environment and physical spaces such as land and cities, and also of bodies, lines, organic forms and nature. The possibility of layering these elements, experiences and studies and expressing them through images drives my practice.” - Himani Gupta