Prabha Shah (b. 1947)

Prabha Shah is an Indian modernist painter who paints the emotional and visual beats of her homeland. Inspired by the colours and textures of Rajasthan, she turns landscapes, streets and people of India into poetic compositions full of warmth and longing. Her work is a dialogue between memory and reality where colour is language and emotion – an instrument to express nostalgia, love and introspection.

As she herself says, “There’s a central theme to my work: India, or more specifically Rajasthan, in colours. Cities, streets, people, desert depictions fading fast, everything I love and miss.” For Shah, painting is a way to be close to the beauty and pain of things that cannot be possessed – “things that hurt us but we insist on desiring and loving in a special way”. Through this balance of form and feeling her work is about the permanence of cultural identity and the impermanence of human emotion.