There is a world in which human bodies fold into themselves and familiar forms return in altered guises. A crouched figure from the 1980s resurfaces decades later, transformed, yet recognisable; torsos recur, carrying the weight of vulnerability and self-examination. At the core of this visual language stands an eclectic sensibility in the form of white haired, bespectacled Kanchan Chander, whose five-decade engagement with drawing, printmaking, and the female psyche comes together in The Grammar of the Self, presented by Gallery Ragini in Delhi. A retrospective of a voyage of mind and memory: early portraits, self-portraits and figurative studies are in conversation with celebrated woodcuts and abstractions. Its passage is not linear: motifs disappear and return, but carrying traces of earlier selves almost like features in a reincarnation. “I see the crouched figures which were there in the ‘80s returning in 2026, almost after 45-50 years,” says the 69-year-old artist. That’s now, a transcendental statement. Chander carries the presence of someone who has spent decades looking at bodies—including her own—not as objects of prettiness, but as repositories of Proustian remembrance, desire, experience and identity. The female torso is a recurring site of vulnerability, agency and introspection. From Torso (2007), Black & Red (2018) and Golden Torso in Red I & II (2022) to works such as Play of Architectural Forms, Waltz of Forms, and Echoes in the Line, the body gradually loosens into abstraction. Yet the impulse is the same: using space, form and line to explore the interior self. Her recent found-object works in Adbhut Bhavya (2026) extend this enquiry into material and form.
Drawing and printmaking serve different impulses. Printmaking—with its plates, stones, reversal and laborious processes—allows for unpredictability. “There are lots of elements of surprise in it, whereas drawing is direct,” she says. “Drawing comes directly from your thinking, from your mind, from your heart.” Across etching, aquatint, lithography, woodcut and linocut, and later painting, sculpture and mixed media, the line is the connective tissue.
Her work is criss-crossed with autobiographical threads—motherhood, loss, domestic life and women’s experiences—but is not confined to self- remembrance. “Very often, when I did these autobiographical works—for example, works based on my child growing up—I was putting myself in the shoes of every woman, every mother.” Stories of personal loss change into universal images: her brother’s death in an accident, the breakdown of her marriage, and her parents’ decline into old age. Even when drawing from her own life, she prefers suggestion to confession, rendering experience “in a very subtle and indirect way.”
Being a woman, she says, has not consciously dictated her subjects, though the realities of a woman’s life inevitably shaped how she worked. The physical demands of printmaking required constant negotiation such as lifting lithographic stones or repeatedly operating a press. “It is all about time management,” she says. “I think, over the years, I got pretty good at it.”
Geography, like so many other artists, is a quiet influence. Chander’s formative years took her from New Delhi to East Berlin, Santiago and Paris—her father was a diplomat. Then travelling solo. “Where I went, I was influenced by the culture,” she says. The old East Berlin, in particular, sharpened her draughtsmanship. “The Germans are such perfectionists, that being exposed to their work made my own drawing absolutely flawless.” Maybe self-confidence and ego can often be misinterpreted in an artist’s personality. Elsewhere, more than her teachers, the “ambience, the atmosphere” stayed with her. Those influences have produced a practice that is seamlesly contradictory. A body can suggest a single woman but evoke many; a crouched figure can belong to one era and return in another; an architectural form can become an emotional landscape.
Her faith in printmaking has deepened. Over the years, she has watched young artists push the medium into increasingly sophisticated territory, and believes it has moved beyond its former “stepmotherly treatment”. As painting price tags escalate, prints and drawings also offer younger collectors a more accessible entry into art is what she feels.
To be concise, The Grammar of the Self brings together the soul of Chander’s practice: body and line, intimate and universal, repetitive and transformative. Across five decades, the self emerges not as a fixed subject but one continually revised by experience, geography, relationships and time. The torso returns, carrying another history; the line remains, but speaks differently.
Chander has no intention of settling into a final vocabulary: “I’m a very curious person, trust me.” Situations, places and encounters shape her method of transforming personal vulnerability into something more universal.