ABOUT the artist
Kesha Dalal is a Brooklyn, New York based oil painter whose work explores how experience and culture shapes one’s material memory through erosion. Influenced by the visual language of her South Asian heritage, Dalal grew up participating in her family’s Indian wedding decoration business, where she was surrounded by saturated colors, vibrant embellishment, and ritual display. That early exposure to maximalist creativity and Hindu mythology continues to inform her sensitivity to texture, patterns, and symbolic objects.
With a professional background in fashion, Dalal brings an editorial awareness to composition, studying how fabric and organic surfaces can play alongside vibrant colors. While continuing to dedicate her practice to still life that communicates inheritance, labor, and femininity, The Vahana Series explores a narrative that symbolizes the fear, distress, and shame a woman consumes for questioning her culture due to life-threatening consequences. Though the topic of this series is centered around South Asian culture, she intends for this work to resonate with women of related cultures who experience similar struggles.
about the art
The physicality of Dalal’s fruit still lives to explore the idea of generational trauma alongside beauty and excess: how saturated color swells while insides are mutilated. The fruits she is naturally drawn are not random; guava, dragonfruit, and passionfruit carry culturally vibrant geographies, trade histories, ritual associations, and her personal inherited memory.
Her work is rapidly shifting toward a more explicitly South Asian visual language while continuing to explore themes of femininity and trauma through human and animal forms, fantasy environments, and devotional architecture that appears broken but remains sturdy regardless.
The Vahana Series allows Dalal to work in narratives by limiting her color palette and returning to recurring objects in order to let meaning unfold gradually across the five paintings. The compositions remain restrained and intimate, yet emotionally charged. Through the palpable heat that enforces warm colors to swell and a connection between geography and inheritance emerges a new, fictional world inspired by her personal relationship with Hindu and South Asian culture.
