B. 1979

Minal Damani layers and repeats the elements till they turn into ever-growing and engulfing spaces. Her works usurp the dominant male world’s visions through simple, poetic but irresistibly powerful imageries. Her works have connections with daydreaming, memorizing, fabricating and such mind filling acts. Even in her works she engages herself in this act of filling – filling the surrounding emptiness or filling the void within. For Minal, the act of filling canvases with various kinds of imageries comes as an effect of this thought process or state of mind. The state of mind where the empty spaces are filled with imaginations or remembrance where one can get dissolved or surrender or hide as if completely absorbed.

 Most of her works have a peculiar relationship with nature as some natural elements like moon, stars, sun, sky, forests, birds, clouds keep occurring in her canvases. She constantly goes back to the memories and fantasies that allow one to skip the world around and escape to some other space.

Minal strives to look for a pattern to structure her pictorial surface painted in oil and gouache. As Nancy Adajania observes “Damani’s paintings are based, as I read them, on the notion of emptiness as the dynamic principle of transformation. Her images emerge from – or grow to cover – an empty black background, like shapes gathered from a primordial darkness. She fills up the potent emptiness, with which she begins, with the swirl of smoky clouds, crisp wedges of moons, or with navel-deep flowers. In such an emptiness, which is “fully inhabited by fullness” in the Chinese phrase, Damani’s images become at once cosmic and intimate.”

Minal Damani completed her B.F.A (Painting) from Sir J.J School of Art, Mumbai in 2000 and M.F.A (Painting) from Sir J.J School of Art, Mumbai in 2002. She lives and works in Mumbai.