“It Will Rain Again When We Meet,” A solo exhibition of Priyanka Aelay

Dates: 9 September – 6 October

Venue: KYNKYNY 

Address: 4th floor, 20, Gool Mansion, Homji St, Kala Ghoda, Fort, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400001

Timings: Monday – Saturday | 11:00 AM – 6:00 PM (Closed on Sundays)

Free Entry

Description:  Recently launched in Mumbai and located in a beautiful art deco building, KYNKYNY Art Gallery is happy to announce its next show. It is called “It Will Rain Again When We Meet”, a solo exhibition by Priyanka Aelay. The forest in all its richness and diversity takes vital importance in Priyanka Aelay’s paintings. The lush terrain is visible in vast expanses, revealing the presence of fauna amidst the vegetation – a fox here, a tiger there, a jewel-like bird peeping from within the multihued foliage. The delicacy and scale of these creatures emphasises the larger-than-life quality of their surroundings, building on an atmosphere of abundance and growth. Working with fine layers of acrylic pigments on linen canvas, she creates landscapes that bring together the real and imaginary, the tangible and intangible. 

The current series of work reflects Priyanka’s deep engagement with her academic research in film studies and visual culture, and extends her exploration of popular folklore and myth that often locate entire narratives within the jungle. The subject matter, with respect to its literary context, poetry and theatricality impacted her understanding and translation of visual storytelling in subtle ways. Some of the tales she studied, including the widely dramatized ‘Baalanagamma’, are characterised by the protagonists’ trials and tribulations within challenging circumstances in the wild, unknowing of the almanac and dependent on the rhythms of nature to calculate the passing of time. This also influenced the development of a series of largescale works in circular format, recalling moon-cycles that are both a feminine reference as well as compositional devices that break the hierarchy of directional viewing and normalised segregations of aquatic, terrestrial, and aerial environments. 

In her paintings, Priyanka articulates seamless relationships between arboreal and underwater life, where ferns could be corals, water could be sky, and vice-versa, visually and metaphorically signifying interconnection and coexistence of all life. The fauna, sometimes isolated and at times featured with companions in the landscape, carry the symbolic presence of human beings within the meditative and contemplative space. 

While figuration in the social context played a role in her earlier work, landscape has been a mainstay in her visual vocabulary. Her imagery resonates with the sophisticated colour palettes and botanical brilliance that exists in the miniature painting tradition, something she has always been drawn toward. Through her art she creates portals into new realities, with a delicate balance of stylised linear configurations and luminous painted spaces, where tethered and free-floating organic forms appear to move and breathe. One of Priyanka’s aesthetic abilities is to play with sensory perceptions by juxtaposing colours and utilising transparency and opacity of pigment, creating the foundation for gentle transitions of mood; light and dark, day and night, waking and sleeping.  

While celebrating essences of folklore and natural life in its myriad representations and imaginations, Priyanka leaves space for the viewers varied interpretations, leaving clues and windows to ideas in elusive details spread across the picture plane. She constructs magical worlds that quietly subsume and embrace the life forms that live within it. 

ABOUT PRIYANKA AELAY

Priyanka Aelay’s acrylic works unfold like magic realist tales filled with birds, beasts, animals, trees and flowers in bold, vibrant colours. Her mythical, enchanted forests are filled with intricate motifs, exquisite patterns and striking imagery. On her canvas, age-old folk heritage — particularly from Telangana, from where she hails — is transformed into something that is distinctly contemporary and wholly unique, as she seeks inspiration from the environment and indigenous flora and fauna. Aelay’s paintings reflect the energy, momentum and simplicity of folk art, as well as the aesthetics and language of contemporary art. Paintings do not follow a linear perspective in the artist’s work, as she plays with space, dimensions and perspective to make the landscapes appear free flowing and free floating. Aelay’s works are an invitation to transport and immerse yourself in the unboundedness of nature and the wilderness, something sorely lacking in our urban ecosystems.

ABOUT KYNKYNY ART GALLERY: KYNKYNY was founded in 2004 by Namu Kini and Vivek

Radhakrishnan. With an aim to make the fascinating world of Indian art more accessible to the

world, KYNKYNY supports established and emerging artists – offering a highly curated selection of original and authentic artworks. Since its inception, KYNKYNY has worked with over 300 artists from all over India and has shipped its art across the globe. 

Working across galleries in Bengaluru and Mumbai, and through regular participation in India’s leading art fairs, KYNKYNY presents exhibitions that explore the ideas defining our time. Questions of ecology and landscape, identity, memory and cultural inheritance, the urban condition, politics, and abstraction recur throughout the programme, not as fixed themes but as evolving conversations led by artists themselves.

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