Thapar Contemporary presents “Wild, Ordinary, Enchanting, Excruciating Beauty”

New Delhi: Thapar Contemporary presents “Wild, Ordinary, Enchanting, Excruciating Beauty”, a group exhibition that examines the increasingly blurred boundaries between personal anxiety and collective crisis. Curated by Vaibhav Raj Shah in collaboration with Jasone Miranda-Bilbao, it is on view till June 21, 2026. Bringing together eleven contemporary artists, the show reflects on how lived experiences today are shaped by overlapping conditions of uncertainty, contradiction, and a shared sense of unease.

The showcase features works across sculpture, installation, drawing, and moving image by Amitabh Kumar, Bhrigudev Ranade, Chandrashekhar Koteshwar, Harmeet Singh Rattan, Harsha Durugadda, Jagadeesh Tammineni, Madhurjya Dey, Raj Jariwala, Vanshika Babbar, Vasudha Kapadia, and Yogesh Ramkrishna. While each artist presents a distinct body of work, their practices come together to form a layered narrative that responds to the complexities of contemporary life.

Ashish Thapar, Founder, Thapar Contemporary, said, “What stands out is how these artists engage with complexity without simplifying it. Their practices remain attentive and rigorous, creating a space where viewers are encouraged to slow down, look more closely, and stay with the realities shaping our everyday experience.”

The exhibition examines a present where distinctions between the intimate and the larger world are increasingly difficult to sustain. As personal anxieties intersect with broader social and political disruptions, a sense of instability becomes embedded in everyday life. The works do not attempt to resolve these tensions; instead, they invite closer attention, offering moments of pause and reflection within an evolving and often unstable reality.

Curator Vaibhav Raj Shah said, “We are often told to separate what is small from what is large, the personal from the political. But as those distinctions collapse, they reveal how closely these experiences are entangled. The show emerges from this space of tension, offering ways of seeing that stay with the complexity of the present.”

The act of presenting artworks within the gallery space, under such conditions, carries a renewed sense of urgency. Situated within this tension, the exhibition brings together practices that respond to an atmosphere marked by instability and transition, creating a space for engagement, observation, and shifting perspectives.

Exhibition Details

Title: Wild, Ordinary, Enchanting, Excruciating Beauty

Venue: Thapar Contemporary

Address: The One, Kapashera Estate, Rajokri Crossing, NH-8, New Delhi

Timings: 11:00 AM to 7:00 PM

On View Till: June 21, 2026 | Monday – Sunday

Curatorial Note

Wild, ordinary, enchanting, excruciating beauty

We are told to triage our despair, to sort daily grief into manageable categories – there are small problems, and there are big problems. Yet as that distinction begins to blur, it reveals itself less as clarity and more as evasion. When systemic failures seep into the air we breathe, when institutions falter, public discourse fractures and uncertainty becomes ambient, the boundary between the intimate and the catastrophic dissolves. In that collapse of scale, what emerges is a wild, ordinary, enchanting, excruciating beauty that binds the so-called small and the so-called big into a single, contradictory texture of lived experience.

To place artworks inside a white cube under such conditions can register as both ordinary and absurd. The gesture is familiar in the art world, yet in this moment, hanging new work while the world outside is literally and metaphorically burning feels closer to a risky wager than a neutral act. It is within this tension that this exhibition takes shape. Eleven artists continue to work in the midst of an atmosphere marked by exhaustion and slow-moving collapse. Across sculpture, moving image, installation, and drawing, they track the uneasy zone where private worries brush up against shared political and social realities.

Wild, ordinary, enchanting, excruciating beauty arises from the friction between the artist’s ongoing studio practice and the quieter destabilisation of the world outside it. The works do not promise escape. Instead, they open up other ways of looking – brief pauses, sideways glances, and flickers of resistance within a reality that increasingly asks us to pay closer attention.

Curated by Vaibhav Raj Shah in collaboration with Jasone Miranda-Bilbao