About
Divya Pamnani (b.1983) is an artist based in Bombay practicing a syncretic form of visual story-telling drawn from traditional art forms of India, inspired by a love for playful and intricate pattern making.
Divya has studied Psychology for her undergraduate education at the University of Texas at Austin (2007) and has a Master’s in Public Health from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor (2011); she lived in the United States until 2014 and worked in the non-profit sector until she decided to pursue a full-time studio practice in 2020. Divya spent a summer at the New York Academy of Art and Design in 2018, where she explored paths to abstraction under Peter Bonner, and developed a drawing practice with Samuel Adoquei. She has done a Post Graduate Diploma in Indian Aesthetics (2019) and coursework in The Art of the Book in South Asia (2021) at Jnanapravaha, a Theory Art Education Institute in Bombay. Concurrently in 2019, she pursued training in the Indian Miniature painting technique from Master Artist Mahaveer Swami in Rajasthan, a proponent of the Bikaner School of painting. During her time training, she got to witness firsthand the studio practice of a traditional Master Artist, how he prepares brushes, pigments and surfaces, reminiscent of the Mughal and Rajput painting ateliers she studied about in her coursework in The Art of the Book. All the self-sought course-work, academic and technical, have helped her hone in on the practice of Miniature Painting, as a foundation for developing a unique visual vocabulary. For the last 3 years, Divya has been focussed on just that, developing a visual language by building on the rich legacy of miniature paintings. She is a professional scuba diver and the aura of the deep blue beyond often informs her subject and colour palette.
Statement
Art Exhibits
Residencies
Aware of the vast and rich legacy of Indian Miniature Paintings, Divya is engaging with the tradition, crafting a unique visual language, and painting on themes that are personal yet universal, carefully referencing select imagery to convey meaning and symbolism through her work.
The techniques she learned under Master Artist Mahaveer Swami in Rajasthan have been extremely impactful to her recent body of work. It offers a coming together of the medium and the virtues she aspires to imbibe in her life in that the process requires a conscious slowing down; the art-making is meditative and time-consuming, demanding dexterity, patience and striving for perfection.
Similar to traditional miniature artists, in the making of her work Divya uses fine squirrel hair brushes (i.e. qalams), natural hand-ground stone pigments and handmade paper (i.e. wasli). She supplements the matte opacity of stone pigments with vibrant inks and gouache, which allows her to play with opacity and translucency in the handling of colour.
A surreal beauty emerges in Divya’s work; she proposes something sublime and mature in hue, expressing balance and flow in pattern repetition, using colours in ways that are striking yet soothing. As a deep-sea diver the circularity of unending underwater life offers her a contemplation on our personal and universal existential attempts, of ordering the microcosm of our lives with the macrocosm of the universe’s life.
This is the essence of her work, an endeavour to bring positivity, beauty and joy into this world.
2025 Kalakriti Art Gallery, Group Show, ‘Echoes Within’, Bikaner House, New Delhi, India
2025 Kalakriti Art Gallery, Group Show, ‘Origin Story’, New Delhi, India
2025 The Strangers House, Group Show, ‘The Material Turn’, Mumbai, India
2024 Art + Charlie, Group Show, Raw Collaborative 2024, Gandhinagar, India
2024 Ojas Art, Group Show, ’Musawwari Miniatures Today’, New Delhi, India
2024 Space 118, Group Show ‘Future of Imagination’, Mumbai, India
2024 Art + Charlie, Group Show ‘Off Margins: Miniatures in the Postmodern, Mumbai, India
2023 Modern Art Gallery, Group Show 'Landscapes in Flux’, Bikaner House, New Delhi, India
2023 Surat Art Fair, Group Show, Gujarat, India
2022 Colours in Confluence, Debut Solo, Kathiwada City House, Mumbai, India
2020 The Design Concierge, Virtual Exhibit, Mumbai, India
2020 India Design ID, Site-specific Installation, New Delhi, India
Hampi Art Lab, Artist in Residence, October through December 2024