Rhea Maheswari

INFO

Name	Rhea Maheshwari (she/her)
Born	1993
Country of Birth	India
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Indian
Dealer Gallery	Bergman Gallery
Artform	Visual arts
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Rhea Maheshwari is a visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Through painting and drawing she creates compositions that convey psycho-spiritual moods that represent memories from her childhood in India. In much of her work, she uses Cartesian mapping tools to create geometric order, upon which she adds more organic elements, like flowers, human figures, animals and mythical deities. Her practice takes inspiration from several traditions, such as Mughal miniatures from the 17th and 18th centuries, Buddhist and Tantric traditions of mandala-making, and 18th-century European Romanticism.

In the exhibition Two Oceans at Once (2019), curated by Charlotte Huddleston and Cameron Ah Loo-Matamua and presented at The Physics Room, Maheshwari framed her work as a way to explore her personal relationship between East and West, producing a “third liminal territory that reconciles differences, and imagines an alternative utopian future that unites both geographies.” Her work Ornamental Utopia was a 9.6-metre-wide wall painting that Maheshwari had created by weaving various symbols that referenced photographs of architecture, people, flora and fauna that she had taken during her travels between India and Europe. She explains that the process of creating this piece during the installation period of this exhibition was a meditative experience, and compared it to performing a devotional ritual.

Maheshwari explains, “I get into a kind of flow or Samāveśa in Sanskrit and depict that state of mind or union through symbols. A narrative emerges with a protagonist being part of a larger tapestry or a divine pattern unfolding in real time.” She uses her painting practice to subvert formalised and scientific Eurocentric practices of mapping land. Though deeply influenced by her presence and exposure within the Western world, she also co-opts its tools to instead connect to her body and meditative Indian spirituality. As she states “I want my paintings to act as a portal that allows me to self reflect on my own place in the world and dream of new possibilities.”