those who walk before me Joya Mukerjee Logue

Vadehra Art Gallery presents a solo exhibition of paintings by Indian-American artist Joya Mukerjee Logue, marking her first-ever presentation in India. those who walk before me is a comprehensive presentation of Mukerjee Logue’s decade-long painting practice with a recent body of work, including around thirty paintings in oil and watercolour. The show will open at our contemporary gallery on 27 August 2024, and will be on view until 17 September 2024. 

Born to an American mother and Indian father, Joya Mukerjee Logue embodies a mixed cultural heritage whose esoteric qualities yield inner itineraries seeking connections to people, places and things across cultural and conceptual boundaries. Her practice is informed by personal inquiry and research into her cultural identity, often supported by regular travels to India. Her paintings overlap the reminiscences of familial and cultural memory with experiences of the present through the contours of her life in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA – offering intimate documentations of the human condition and the way people live out their existences through time, emotion and belonging. The enduring human spirit, tied to the animism of culture, land and nature, recurs as motifs in her soulful and charming portrayals of everyday life, rendered with fluid strokes in an earthen palette, as self-reflections of an individual beset within a plural identity.

These recent paintings explore the architecture of and neighbourhood surrounding her paternal ancestral home in Ambala, Haryana, situated in the bustling bazar off the old Grand Trunk Road. Here, Mukerjee Logue turns an anthropological lens upon herself – poising herself towards self-discovery from reflections on collective memory and experience, in an effort to reclaim and articulate narratives of continuity in time, history and culture through changing structures, stories and selves.


Words Platform Desk
Date 04.09.2024