Rinku Choudhary’s Delhi exhibition explores memory and home

*A Soliloquist’s Journal*, Rinku Choudhary’s solo exhibition at Delhi’s Shridharani Gallery, brought together paintings on canvas and paper exploring memory, domestic life and identity.

Presented by Art Incept and curated by Prima Kurien, the exhibition included works featuring a woman seated loosely on a chair, surrounded by marks resembling scattered thoughts. Choudhary used layered surfaces that obscure and interrupt figures, rather than simply describing home interiors, to explore routine, silence and emotional restraint.

Her work draws on her childhood in a large joint family, including restrictions on her movement after dusk because of her gender. Birds seen from the terrace of her childhood home in Delhi-6, and memories of a beloved dog, recur as markers of belonging and time.

Choudhary was influenced by psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s ideas of the “true self” and “false self”, alongside artists including Mary Cassatt, Arpita Singh, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Tyeb Mehta. Kurien said the paintings let domestic structures speak through “gesture, composition, colour and absence.”