Dense with meticulous lines, teeming with mythic women whose hair flies free, Seema Kohli’s canvases feel like living organisms—breathing, pulsing, expanding. For Kohli, the line is not a tool but a beginning. “I don’t know what image is going to be created or how it is going to render itself. At times, I am surprised when I look at the lines that I have created,” she says. The exhibition With Her Hair Running Wild, currently on view at Triveni Kala Sangam, gathers the earliest and the latest of her works like chapters of an autobiography written in ink and pigment. But for Kohli, the show is not curated for an audience—it is an inward reckoning. “It is a conversation I have with myself while I paint—a path toward self-discovery,” she says. “Through my art, I am trying to reveal myself to myself first.” The viewer, she hopes, may enter that private dialogue and find their own reflection within it.
The oldest drawings on display date back to the 1980s—made late at night, after household chores were done. Armed with pen, ink and paper, she toiled. Just a woman and her line. Those early works are stark, largely monochromatic. Colour arrived later, when she joined Triveni in the ’90s. “Most of my works were monochromatic in the initial years, but as the colour returned to my life in later years, it came into my canvases as well,” she shares. The shift is visible—what begins in restraint eventually erupts into bold, almost celebratory palettes that now define her practice. The title of the show is as untamed as the figures she paints. “In most of my works, the feminine form’s hair is left open. The goddesses—Kali and Chamunda—are uninhibited and liberated,” she says.
Kohli remembers her grandfather cutting animal shapes out of rotis, and her grandmother baking tiny clay figurines on an angeethi. “I got drawn to clay from there, when I was hardly two or three years old. Art came to me as a way of life and of expression; as a way of touch and seeing,” she recalls. She describes those early years as the “most attentive and informative”.
Though she earned a diploma in Applied Arts from South Delhi Polytechnic for Women, philosophy ran just as deep. At Miranda House, she formally studied the discipline, drawn to European thinkers like Berkeley, Hume and Descartes even as she remained steeped in Indian philosophy at home. “My concepts were formalised there and they have matured in different mediums,” she says.
There were turning points, too. One came when Kumar Gallery bought her complete body of 24 works at a time when she was unknown and navigating life as a single mother of two. Another milestone followed in 2005, when Ebrahim Alkazi offered her a show at Art Gallery Heritage. Today, her work has travelled far beyond those quiet nights of ink and paper. Yet the core remains the same: the line, the feminine, the cosmos folded into the personal.
When & Where
With Her Hair Running Wild
Till March 15
Triveni Kala Sangam, Delhi