Explore Levels by Tanya Goel

Finding beauty in construction materials from around the country, New Delhi-based artist Tanya Goel creates artworks out of them. Interplaying with time, language, architecture and technology, she works with limestone, glass, lead and other such materials in her canvases. Amalgams of colour, abstraction and design, Goel’s artworks attempt to ‘construct a record of urban space’.

5 Questions with the artist, Tanya Goel

1. Artistic Motivations “I think motivation lies somewhere in between our existence in time, and our instinct to survive. To be able to understand time, is perhaps what motivates me do anything at all. As for art, it’s manifestation of how I pass my time.”
2. Inspirations “Inspiration is a fleeting gesture. What holds my interest, is our inability or ability to perceive colour as a fact. I study the relationship of colour to light, and to material, as it is found and used in everyday life.”
3. On the wall at home “Artists I look at, history of pigment making in miniatures (Mughal, Pahari, Rajasthani), photographs by Rodchenko, the red painting by Matisse, Nasreen Mohamedi, Maholy Nagy, Joseph Albers, KG Subramanyan, Bhupen Khakkar, Victor Vasarely, Botticelli… (I think this list could go on).”
4. Concerns that find a place in your art “The way cities are navigated, broken and remade; relationships between the ‘old and the new’; and the continuous act of blinking, to read just our sight, to this flux.”
5. If not an artist, you would have been… “I think of my practice as alchemy and in modern terms being closest to that of a colour chemist.”

Level is on display at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai (2 Sunny House, 16/18 Mereweather Road, Behind Taj Mahal Hotel, Colaba) until February 18, 2016.