'Gallery Pristine Contemporary presents Go Easy On Me Baby… It’s My First Time Too, the first presentation of works by Singapore-born, Brooklyn-based artist Nature Shankar in India. The exhibition, opening Thursday, 12th March 2026, brings together fourteen mixed-media paintings, including five large-scale works, foregrounding her ongoing inquiry into the body as a site of emotional memory.
Working across paper pulp, fabric, embroidery and collage, Shankar approaches abstraction as a bodily act rather than a pictorial exercise. Surfaces are built through repetition and abrasion, through stitching, tearing, layering and reopening. Pigment and fibre accumulate into forms that feel arrived at over time, bearing the imprint of touch and pressure.
As Textile & Craft Revivalist Priti Mahajan writes in her accompanying text, Shankar’s practice is shaped by ‘two lineages – an Indian-Hindu father and a Chinese-Buddhist mother,’ each carrying an understanding of time as cyclical rather than final. From her Indian inheritance emerges an intimacy with textile, where cloth absorbs heat, scent and duration. From her Chinese heritage comes an attentiveness to equilibrium, a steadiness within change. Mahajan notes that the female form appears 'not as figure but as presence,' held through layers that gather, compress and endure.
Writer and Curator Reilly Davidson, in a parallel essay, situates Shankar’s work within a somatic framework. Attuned to Eastern philosophies in which energy cycles rather than disappears, the artist treats the body as both archive and conduit. Davidson observes that embodiment in Shankar’s practice registers through 'density, abrasion, repetition, and repair rather than explicit statement,' allowing grief, anger and care to surface without illustration. Abstraction becomes a method for navigating what resists direct language.
Shankar’s recent palette marks a subtle shift. Earlier swells of pink, suggestive of fleshy warmth, give way here to cooler blues and aqueous tones that invoke the body’s liquid architecture. Yellows and earthen shades introduce luminosity and expanse. Spiralling forms echo processes of circulation and release, mapping internal states without submitting to fixed imagery. The compositions hover between meditation and friction, where labour cultivates awareness and texture becomes a primary register.
'Nature’s work carries a rare physical intelligence,' say Arjun Sawhney and Arjun Butani, Co-Founders of Gallery Pristine Contemporary. 'Each surface holds the evidence of its making: pulped paper, stitched fabric, pigment worked and reworked. There is discipline in the restraint, and clarity in her commitment to abstraction as a way of processing lived experience. Introducing her practice in India feels timely, particularly in light of the cultural inheritances that inform it.'
Born in 1996 in Singapore, Shankar has exhibited internationally at Gajah Gallery, Yogyakarta; The Esplanade, Singapore; Art Fair Philippines; Singapore Art Week; and the NARS Foundation, New York. Her residencies include ChaNorth (New York), LMCC Arts Center Residency (NYC), Studio Batur (Indonesia), and OH! Open House (Singapore).
She is currently based in Brooklyn. Go Easy On Me Baby… It’s My First Time Too extends Gallery Pristine Contemporary’s engagement with contemporary practices across the South Asian diaspora, presenting a body of work that situates abstraction as a language for lived experience, memory and resistance.'
Go Easy On Me Baby… It’s My First Time Too on view at Gallery Pristine Contemporary from 12th March to 3rd April, 2026.
Words Platform Desk
Date 2.3.2026