A Fragile Becoming: Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi’s 'Metamorphosis' at Bikaner House

In the hushed corridors of Bikaner House, where colonial grace meets contemporary sensibility, Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi’s Metamorphosis prepares to unfold—a curatorial encounter that spans not just the breadth of his two-decade-long practice, but the subtle, often intangible terrains of transformation itself. Curated by Sanya Malik, the exhibition arrives not as a retrospective, but as a quiet act of unearthing—of mapping the shifts, fractures, and expansions of an artist’s internal and external landscapes.

Chaturvedi’s work refuses the comfort of the singular. With an obsessive attention to detail, he draws and paints with a precision that edges on devotion, creating surfaces that shimmer between hyper-reality and dream. The worlds he builds teem with paradox: beauty and decay live side by side, as do nature and mechanization, fragility and menace. Bougainvillea petals drift beside blades; butterflies hover near wires. And through it all, his anthropomorphic figures—unsettling, tender, unknowable—stare back at us like fractured mirrors, offering neither resolution nor rest.

This exhibition is not static. It is a movement—a slow drift from narrative figuration to abstraction, from the clearly rendered to the deliberately undone. Early pen-and-ink works confront us with figures in the grip of their own psychological awareness. But as the show unfolds, those figures dissolve into swirling forms, their identities unmoored, their bodies shifting into dreamscapes that refuse to settle. What emerges is not a chronology but a metamorphosis, one that invites us to ask: are we ever complete, or only ever becoming?

The contrast that pulses throughout his work—between monochrome and iridescence, geometry and wildness—finds particular depth in his sculptural experiments. There, in shimmering steel and translucent colour, Chaturvedi captures what can never be held: the light on a wing, the iridescence of an insect’s body, the sudden collapse of material into memory. These pieces don’t speak—they shimmer, they suggest, they haunt.

Set within the architectural echo of Bikaner House, the exhibition becomes almost site-specific in its resonance. The space itself transforms into a kind of body—each room holding a new breath, a new fragment of Chaturvedi’s metamorphic world. This is a show that must be walked through slowly, felt rather than solved.

Following its close at Bikaner House, Metamorphosis extends into a satellite edition at Black Cube Gallery, offering viewers an elongated encounter with Chaturvedi’s evolving forms. The continuity between the two venues speaks to the deeper truth of the show: that transformation has no final form. It is a process, not a point.

Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi, born in 1981 in Varanasi, brings to his work the intensity of Banaras—a city where death, beauty, ritual, and chaos coexist without contradiction. His visual language, drawn from personal mythologies and philosophical curiosities, spans mediums as diverse as pencil, acrylic, fibreglass, pigment, stainless steel, and wood. His work has travelled widely—from Venice and Seoul to New York and Singapore—and carries with it the trace of each place, each moment, each metamorphosis.

Curator Sanya Malik, the force behind Black Cube Gallery, brings to the exhibition a curatorial instinct shaped by both intimacy and intellect. Raised amid India’s iconic modernists and educated at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, London, Malik sees the gallery not as a room with walls but as a space for encounter, contradiction, and ongoing dialogue. Black Cube itself reflects this ethos—a site where emerging and established artists meet on equal terms, where categories blur, and where art returns to its role as question, not answer.

Metamorphosis does not claim to define transformation—it stages it, gently, precisely, profoundly. In Chaturvedi’s world, to change is not to leave something behind, but to carry it forward in altered form. To become is to remember, to reimagine, and to begin again.

Exhibition Dates: 3rd May to 9th May 2025

Opening Preview: 3rd May at 6 PM

Daily Timings: 4th to 9th May, 11 AM to 7 PM

Venue: CCA Building, Both Floors, Bikaner House, New Delhi

Satellite Exhibition: Black Cube Gallery, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, till 30th May 2025

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