“Humans have always sought a better life and inspiration.”

Suchi Chidambaram is a mainly self-taught painter born and raised in southern India, now living and working in West London. Her work focuses on narrating her experience of a place and its people through rapid palette knife marks using oil paints. Her interpretations are not painted in situ but from memory, allowing fragments of visual data to mingle with subjective and emotional responses. The resulting work varies between figuration and abstraction.

An ACAVA artist since 2008, Suchi’s recent work includes painting the globe ‘Illuminate’ (2022) in Max Roach Park, Brixton for The World Reimagined. She held her first solo exhibition at the Nehru Centre, London in 2006 and has since participated in numerous international shows, including in India, Italy, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman and England.

Crossings is a body of work which attempts to convey the sentiment and mood of journeys. Some voyages in life are born out of curiosity and pleasure while others out of necessity and desperation in order to survive a crisis, be it a natural disaster or conflict. These journeys, whether on one’s own or in company, evoke emotions and responses that are the soul of this exhibition. Large crowds are depicted by strokes of thick oil paint, suggested by rapid palette knife marks with the use of rich, strong colour that symbolise the rhythm, intensity and directional flow of swarming crowds, the patterns they make as they gravitate towards a focus, forming a teeming mass such as in a ‘Converge’ or dispersing from a focus like in ‘Diverge’. Each work tells the story of a crossing, and Crossings is a response to how people seek a better life and inspiration.

A free exhibition of original work, with proceeds from all sales going to the artist and funding public programmes in advancing and diversifying engagement in visual storytelling.