NS Harsha

Born in 1969, NS Harsha lives and works in Mysore, India. He was a recipient of the prestigious DAAD Scholarship in 2012, and was awarded the Artes Mundi Prize in 2008.

Drawing on a broad spectrum of Indian painting traditions and popular arts, as well as the Western canon, NS Harsha creates quietly philosophical, luminous works that reflect on geopolitical order and on our increasingly technologically mediated relationship with the world. In exquisitely rendered paintings, works on paper, wall and floor pieces, sculptures, site-specific installations and public projects, the Mysore-based artist examines structures, borders and barriers as ever-shifting concepts, alluding to an interconnectedness that encourages viewers to consider their relationship to the artwork as part of a wider conversation about systems of knowledge, belief and power.

While storytelling remains central to his practice, linear narrative is largely absent from the loosely gridded compositions of Harsha’s canvases. The artist has described his process as akin to “chanting with forms”, recalling a musical sense of cyclical time. The mood of these densely populated works is quietly philosophical, offering gentle humour and a dreamlike grace to the human struggle of making meaning — whether scientific or spiritual. It is this non-hierarchical weaving of elements that lends Harsha’s work its visual richness and its generosity of spirit.