ArteEast is pleased to present an interview with artist Deeya Bhugra as part of our Artist Spotlight series.
Deeya Bhugra was born in New Delhi and is currently based in New York. She graduated from School of Visual Arts (SVA) with an MFA in Fine Arts in 2023. She has exhibited extensively throughout India and New York. Primarily a painter, she uses stippling as a technique for its meditative quality. It is during the process that she begins to lose herself in intricate labyrinths of thought; and subtle, ethereal revelations surface. As she delves deeper, the amorphous form disseminates grain by grain into its surroundings; and synchronically her rationale starts transcending into an infinite space.
ArteEast: Can you tell us about your work in general and the main themes you return to in your practice?
Deeya Bhugra: I am primarily a painter, I also write poetry, make videos and work with photographs to create immersive installations. My drive to create art comes from a sense of wonder evoked by two major influences – the internal psychological and the external physical worlds.
In an effort to gain a deeper understanding of each, I use the practice of stippling or mark-making within my painting practice to indulge in an intimate experience of creating. My works are often inspired by subtleties found within visual perceptions of nature. For instance, the bewilderment at how infinite strokes run wildly across the sky to settle into an unexpected harmony. I am always working with contradictions within the scope of the same painting, to present a co-existence of duality that conveys a greater sense of unity or interconnectedness.
Another recurring theme in my works is the deceleration of time – demanded by both the viewer and me, to deeply relish the nuances and revelations within these subtleties that we tend to discount in daily life.
AE: You describe your work as non-conceptual, can you delve deeper into what it means to you and how you situate your practice within the Contemporary Art field?
DB: The act of stippling can be characterized as minimal in gesture. Long hours of delving into this art-making process naturally evokes a lot of self-reflection. The mind is constantly perceiving, defining and then evaluating before making choices. This works well for a pragmatic functioning within daily life, but when you look at the larger scheme of things and consider the variables and subjectivity that exists within perception of every situation, object or anything at all, that is when the notion of authenticity collapses. A recognition follows that categorization or conceptualization is limiting and clouds us from a true intrinsic understanding of the subject. So, within my art practice, stippling is a self-prescribed procedure that initiates self-awareness by resisting attachment to concepts. You can also say there is a recognition and acceptance of concepts–only to shed them in pursuit of the absolute and pure.
Contemporaries On Kawara or Veronika Moshnikova finely incorporate the aspect of time journaling into their practice. I am excited to introduce my own approach which regards process in the highest merit, undermining the need to produce a finished and resolved piece of art. Within Contemporary Art, my practice offers a fresh combination of intentionality, minimalism (in effort) and a structured process to create abstract paintings that convey vastness while maintaining a sense of intimacy and awareness of time. Modernism and Abstract Expressionism saw the likes of Hilma Klint, Agnes Pelton, Barnett Newman express the ineffable or non-conceptual through geometric forms and color. Similar to Automatism of the Surrealist movement my practice integrates spirituality into the process in addition to its visual outcome.
AE: You moved to New York from New Delhi to pursue your MFA at SVA. In your experience, how does the art world climate of these two cities differ and how has this move affected your practice on an external and internal level?
DB: The shift to New York is one you can’t ever be prepared for, especially as in my case, if you’ve lived your life within the comforts of your parents’ home. But most exciting to me was the pursuit of independence and self-discovery, equally integral to my art practice. There is enormous artistic talent in Delhi, it reflects in works that are treated with great patience, care and sensitivity. New York, on the contrary, is very fast-paced. The subconscious pressure to become visible among a plethora of contemporary artists also affects the work, there is a need to create and sell faster.
The works I made in Delhi were muted whereas my current palette embraces dynamic and bold hues. It’s more expressive in gesture and ambitious in scale, in an attempt to demand the viewer’s attention. The city has made me emotionally strong, the people of New York are so accepting and there’s room for everyone. I’ve come to recognize the values I stand for and don’t shy away from expressing my vulnerabilities and loyalty towards them.
Delhi isn’t far from the globally experienced trends. India Art Fair is a private initiative held annually to attract blue chip galleries from across the globe. It’s a great platform for Indian artists to showcase work. However, at a local scale the infrastructure to support emerging artists is missing. Majority of the population in India still considers art a luxury commodity. So art is limited to a certain strata of society, most of whom purchase for purposes of investment or decor. Museums and institutions need to be integrated within the culture at a national level, allowing the private sector to follow.
AE: Tell us about the stippling technique that you work with. When did you begin using this technique? Tell us about the intersection of time, scale, and spirituality that this technique evokes within your work.
DB: Stippling as an art-making technique uses markers or pens to create multiple dots to form an image or a painting.
My first experience with stippling was dreadful. It was for an assignment in my undergrad to compose an outdoor view by building up multiple layers of dots with a micro-tip pen. That is all we did for weeks and none of my friends or I managed to finish the assignment, it was labor intensive and required a lot of precision. The act becomes so mechanical that we were all stippling in our dreams too. But that’s also where the spiritual aspect steps in for my practice, the incessant repetition that transcends into a state of thoughtlessness and spaciousness. I use the canvas as a space to understand and practice my sense of freedom, where the dot becomes irrelevant for its most basal and minimal form. So the simplicity of the act allows me to unburden myself from visual decision-making. The process becomes an act of self-reflection, where judgments and concepts that arise are disregarded for their inauthenticity. The mind quiets into a state of observation, making room for the unconscious channel in.
Visually, stippling allows for infinite possibilities within layering. I am able to toy with dichotomies of macro and micro, monochrome and multi-hued within the same space.
The dots also signify as stoppage points within the psychological and physical record of my time spent with the piece, such that the work becomes a journal – ever evolving with infinite visual outcomes and inconclusive by nature.
AE: You look at your art practice as a spiritual journey. What are the different lateral levels that you have achieved within this journey and how do they reflect within your various bodies of work?
DB: A lot of insightful learning or knowing is iterated while I am working in my studio. I like to draw parallels between functionings within the canvas and mechanisms that are at play or govern our daily lives. For instance in the series of black oil paintings made, one objective was to depict the duality of flat black surface co-existing as a multi-hued 3D space.
The work functions similarly to the experience of walking into a dark room. The viewer’s pupils adjust to darkness, allowing for a sense of space to slowly garner as objects begin to reveal themselves.
Another objective was to use every possible hue to create depth of field within the painting. The dark shades are symbolic of the final stages within the gradient chart, less recognizable for their individual properties and closer to being synonymous with one another until they unite in blackness. There are subtle factors of relativism, lateral hierarchies and co-existence of duality at play within the symbolic interpretation of the painting. In parallel, the rigid labels formulated within society start collapsing as we investigate deeper. One fine example is the fluidity that exists within the vast spectrum of gender identity.
AE: What and who are some of your major creative influences, and why?
DB: Most of my inspiration is derived from intuition or introspection, but books and audio lectures often catalyze or validate this self-talk. There are Youtube talks by spiritual gurus such as Ram Dass, Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle that I often plug into. There’s also Kahlil Gibran and Rumi, philosophers like Plato and philosophies of Advaita Vedanta or non-dualism, encouraged by a vast lineage of gurus – the contemporary being Mooji. In my photography lies answers to all the visual scenes I derive influences from – patterns found in ripples of the sea that become synonymous to the texture of skin, neural networks or microscopic images of a pizza, how the macro view of a rock or stone is also synonymous to its microscopic view.
AE: What are you currently working on and do you have any shows or projects upcoming in 2023-2024?
DB: I am currently finishing up poetry that’s titled Is there anywhere that you aren’t. Excerpted from my journal entries, it’s a narrative of my love story that oscillates ambiguously between autobiography and fiction. The work keeps pushing me to be more vulnerable and explores intersections between text meant for reading and solely for visual purpose. I’m in a group show titled ‘The Hand of the Artist’ on display at the SVA Chelsea Gallery until 14 Aug 2023. It’s with my friends from MFA for the Thesis show. There’s a group show planned for later in the year at the World Trade Center building.
— Interview by Lila Nazemian
DEEYA BHUGRA ONLINE:
Website: deeyabhugra.com
Instagram: @the_rest_ofme
