A major exhibition of new paintings by T. Venkanna (b.1980, Gajwel, India), the artist’s first institutional solo exhibition.

T. Venkanna persistently questions sexual imagination and its entanglements with societal norms, freedom and repression. For his new commission at Studio Voltaire, Venkanna is creating an expansive series of paintings on board using egg tempera and natural pigments. Inspired by the artist's recent travels in Europe, the use of this traditional medium references Venkanna’s encounters with Early Renaissance devotional panel paintings. These new works represent a significant evolution in both scale and form for the artist, with individual paintings reaching across multiple panels.

Informed by the shifting socio-political contexts of India, the artist’s symbolic landscapes, populated by humans, animals and mythical figures, blur the boundaries between private desire and public crisis. Repeating motifs that have appeared in Venkanna’s work over several years, such as the image of Adam and Eve, these new works expand the artist's reflections on power, desire, obedience and transgression, as well as connect with recent works that specifically address the politicisation and weaponisation of sex as a tool of power and coercion.

Emerging from a daily practice of painting and drawing in his studio in Hyderabad, the fantastical and at times unsettling aesthetic of Venkanna’s paintings detail abominable landscapes, with visions that blend the sacred with the scatological, and combine hidden moments of intimacy with disconcerting public spectacles. Amongst palm trees and freshly trimmed topiary, the boundaries between public and private, real and imaginary, object and subject dissolve and reform.

Each composition in the exhibition draws together histories of image-making across Western and South Asian visual traditions. Renaissance imagery, such as Correggio’s Leda and the Swan or Michelangelo’s David, features alongside references to the gilded manuscripts of the Mughal Empire, Indian miniature paintings and the compositions of temple reliefs. By underscoring enduring cycles of desire, destruction and domination, the artist complicates our understanding of a contemporary moment shaped by nationalism, hyperconsumerism, and environmental decay.

Lead Programme Supporter: Blanca & Sunil Hirani Charitable Trust. Programme Supporter: The Burger Collection with additional support from the T. Venkanna Exhibition Circle, The Studio Voltaire Council and Art Fund's John Ruffer Curatorial Grant.