'To speak of painting as world-making is to recognize that images do not merely depict but also invent. In the exhibition Among Things That Grow and Return, Shrimanti Saha invites us into spaces where memory, ecology, architecture, and fiction converge, producing landscapes that feel at once familiar and estranged. The exhibition borrows its title from one of her large-scale canvases, a phrase that suggests cycles, continuities, and the regenerative force of nature. Things grow, things return: plants sprout in ruins, shells cling to stone, figures reappear across canvases. For Saha, painting is both a process of building and of remembering, a way of inhabiting worlds that hover between the real and the imagined.
Saha often describes her practice as akin to writing – she begins with fragments, scenes, or characters that proliferate across a surface in a chain reaction, gradually expanding like an organism. A composition starts from one corner and unfurls outward, accruing layers, details, and unexpected encounters. This method, rooted in drawing, mirrors the process of storytelling. Titles, she notes, often act like entry points in a narrative, anchoring the viewer before they wander through multi-perspectival landscapes. Within a single painting, we may encounter overlapping episodes: interiors colliding with exteriors, plants with machines, and figures engaged in mechanical and leisurely activities.'
- Beatriz Cifuentes Feliciano
