Gauri Gill, Vinnie Gill, and Ladhki Devi

Protruding from the earth, a meteorlike rock gleams against the night sky. In the distance, the silhouette of a construction site looms behind a temporary tin-sheet wall. While the photograph reads like a vision from a terraformed future, it was taken in the city of its title, Kolkata 2009 (a), as part of Gauri Gill’s “Re-memory” series, 2003–. In the exhibition “Sheher, Prakriti, Devi” (City, Nature, and Goddess), the image hangs next to a pastel-and-watercolor work by the artist’s mother, Vinnie Gill. Densely painted with generous autumnal colors, the hills in Shyok River in Nubra Valley, at the foothills of the Karakoram, 2020, echo the sharp contours of the rock in the younger Gill’s photograph. Completing the trio of artists is Ladhki Devi, the veteran Warli painter. Devi’s fluid lines and geometric bodies converge in ritualistic and devotional paintings that tap into the innate relationship among flora, fauna, and humans.

Whether deliberate or incidental, the visual resonances of image, shape, and setting bind the works in the exhibition. As with the rock in Kolkata 2009 (a), the photographs in Gauri Gill’s “Re-memory” series reintroduce what has been erased from our field of view or rendered invisible by changes in the landscape. In Grand Trunk Road, Delhi, 2007 (c), for instance, we see abandoned belongings decaying in packed bundles along the historic trail that once connected Central Asia and India. Vinnie Gills’s subjects are observational as well, though inflected with more intimacy: nearby trees, memories from travels or time spent at monuments. In Devi’s paintings, goddesses swirl on surfaces prepared with mud. In Mata, 2020–21, women go about their daily lives in the shadow of the mother goddess. Here, too, the three artists come together to celebrate inherited knowledge and the tender modes of care emerging from matrilineal kinship.