Virendra Maurya

I am from Mirzapur, yes, Mirzapur, and my practice begins there, in a mofussil town where belonging and identity are complicated things. I grew up in a farming family, close to land and nature, and that relationship runs through everything I make: painting, installation, prints, found objects, material work. My canvases carry a sense of constant movement, conscious, emotional mark-making that sits somewhere near Abstract Expressionism, influenced by Pollock, De Kooning, and Kiefer's raw use of unconventional materials. I work with what the land offers: wood, stone, paper pulp, industrial material gathered on long observational walks. Underneath it all, I'm grappling with the idea of the 'Gaon' that loaded, tender word for home and how for India's internal migrants, it holds both idyllic memory and the harder truths of casteism and displacement. My surfaces try to hold all of that at once.