Artist Seher Shah Exhibits Architectural Works at New Delhi’s Nature Morte Gallery

In Seher Shah’s latest exhibition, the artist’s architectural training is clear. “Of Absence and Weight,” on view at the Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi, includes drawings, prints, and sculpture that both consider the built environment and explore spatial relationships. Thoughtful and structural, her work gives us new ways to consider the lines that form buildings, landscape, and infrastructure. In her series Brutalist Traces, horizontal pencil lines on paper create ghostly versions of Brutalist buildings. In her hand, imposing concrete structures are rendered fragile and fleeting. She further explores construction in the series Flatlands, where arcs and lines cut into depictions of buildings. Architectural drawings become playful as the artist works with perspective and grids. In Mammoth: Aerial, Shah collaborated with photographer Randhir Singh for a series of altered photographs. The works, taken while flying over the United States on commercial flights, show roads, mountains, and buildings from above. Blackened forms censor segments of the landscape, imposing a heavy geometric shape over the photographic image. In the series Hewn, the eye is drawn to negative space and the gridded paper beneath compelling shapes created by the artist. The forms in the woodcuts were extruded into small cast-iron sculptures. Both versions are on display, allowing consideration of the direct relationship between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. Throughout each of the series in the show, Shah’s interest in materiality and construction predominates. “I am very much invested in thinking about architectural aesthetics and space through drawing and sculpture,” the artist writes.

Seher Shah’s “Of Absence and Weight” is on view at the Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi until February 11, 2017.