TARA SABHARWAL
BIO
Originally from Delhi, Sabharwal has been based in NYC since 1989. She graduated from MS University, Baroda and received a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, London. Over a career that spans 40 years, she has had 45 solo shows in Japan, India, Germany, the UK and USA. Sabharwal has received many awards, including: The British Council, Meehan, and Durham Cathedral fellowships in the UK, the Joan Mitchell and Gottlieb Foundation in the USA. Her work is in the collection of the Library of Congress, NY Public Library and the Peabody Essex, Victoria and Albert, DLI and British Museums. She has taught at The Guggenheim and Rubin Museums, The Cooper Union, City College, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and the Women’s Studio Workshop.
SYNOPSIS
My work has dealt largely with the dream-like interface between the conscious self and its subjective world. Figurative imagery, dioramas encased within womb-like vessels, conveyed the entropic multiplicity of reality.
Doing these automatic drawings during a severe COVID isolation last year, however, marks a return to the open awareness I sometimes felt as a child. I set my pen free, and through a process of spontaneous mark making, observe my thoughts until my mind begins to shut down. As I draw, a moving world of shapes and contours emerge and dissolve at an open threshold, transcribing the unseen, unknown within.