Venue: Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Center, Lodhi Estate, New Delhi
Exhibition on view: 28th August – 31st August 2025
Timings: 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM
The Visual Arts Gallery at India Habitat Center presents Fundamental Instincts, a solo exhibition by artist Ankur Rana, curated by noted critic and curator Georgina Maddox. On view from 28th to 31st August 2025, the exhibition showcases Rana’s latest body of work created in a newly discovered medium—Oil on Metal. Through long hours of experimentation, the artist has developed this technique on rose-gold stainless steel, a surface that lends his paintings a reflective shimmer, evoking the movement of water and light. The exhibition brings together twenty-five large canvases, each one unfolding a distinct story that probes the innate human instinct to create, survive, and connect.
The curatorial framework of the exhibition reflects on art as a primal instinct. The instinct of art-making is believed to have evolved as part of humankind’s survival and social interactions. From prehistoric cave markings to today’s contemporary practices, art has never been a mysterious privilege of culture alone, but rather an innate and universal trait shared across ages. While animals rely on instinct for survival, humans exist at the threshold where instinct meets learning, and it is here that art thrives. Studies of chimps drawing outlines or dogs producing trained splashes of colour underline this shared impulse, while humans have elevated it into refined cultural expression.
Within this context, Rana’s works investigate primary emotions and instincts such as preservation of the self, the search for companionship, the desire for love, and the human need to engage with one’s environment. His paintings often blur the boundaries between human, animal, and divine realms, reflecting survival as well as transcendence. In The Bait, Rana employs irony through an oriental woman releasing hearts from her bosom while a man uses the Taj Mahal as bait, commenting on instinct, desire, and survival. In Shallow vs Supreme, Lord Shiva is re-imagined in a contemporary avatar, meditating in smoky mountains with Ganga flowing from his locks, as the third eye hovers between wakefulness and vision. In Cup of Peace, mankind finds harmony with a dove and the surrounding landscape, a metaphor for the instinctive yearning for balance. Works like The Gift weave layers of meaning, where a kingfisher offers fruit to a woman, yet the reflection of a mobile phone in the gold surface suggests that even in nature, technology intrudes into our lives. In Companion, a girl from the North East tenderly interacts with a parrot on her finger, both framed against the majestic Himalayas, capturing the delicate balance between humankind and nature.
Born in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, in 1981, Ankur Rana studied Art Appreciation at the National Museum of Art, New Delhi, before completing his BFA and MFA in Painting from the College of Art, Delhi. Over the last fifteen years, he has held ten solo exhibitions and participated in more than a hundred group shows in India and abroad. His work has been widely recognized, with awards including the AIFACS Award for Best Lithograph (2004), the Embassy of Cuba Award for his painting Motorcycle Diaries (2007), and the Guru Samman by Sanskar Bharti (2019). His works are housed in both private and institutional collections across India and abroad, including Lalit Kala Akademi, the Embassy of Cuba, Imago Mundi, and Liberty House.
With Fundamental Instincts, Rana positions art-making as a universal impulse that bridges instinct and higher reasoning, exploring themes of love, companionship, beauty, and survival. Through his innovative use of metal as canvas, semi-abstract explorations, and symbolist patterns, Rana creates a reflective dialogue between human emotion, environment, and the essential drive to create art.
