At the end of the fifteenth century, a young man walking about the outskirts of Rome tripped over, fell into a hole, and found himself surrounded by intricate friezes featuring arabesque foliage, mythical creatures, and strange human forms. He had accidentally discovered the remains of Roman Emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea or ‘Golden House’, built on a Roman hillside in the first century CE. As word of the discovery spread across the city, Renaissance artists, including Raphael and Michelangelo, rappelled down the hole to see the moulding remains of the unfinished palace. They called the narrative scenes and panoramas which adorned its walls ‘grottesche’, meaning ‘from a cave.’

Admired and scorned in equal measure, the grotesque style has occupied an anomalous position in the history of art. In ancient Rome, where it originated, many ridiculed it as meaningless and illogical. The Roman architect, military engineer, and author Vitruvius called it ‘monstrous.’ The 16th-century Italian artist and historian Giorgio Vasari deplored it as ‘licentious and highly ridiculous.’ In the nineteenth century, the French artist and caricaturist Honoré Daumier transformed the grotesque into an explicit visual language through which he satirised political corruption and social hypocrisy.

In the twentieth century, proponents of the Art Nouveau experimented with the grotesque in visual art, including German expressionist cinema, to satirise the moral rot and corruption eating away at the Weimar Republic. In post-war Europe, the grotesque gained renewed relevance as artists sought ways to confront social disintegration, war, masculinity, fractured families, and geopolitical anxieties without lapsing into sentimentality, didacticism, or overt polemic.

As we enter another period of widespread societal degradation, when nothing seems to be working as it should, the grotesque has returned once again. It’s in memes and shitposts, on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram. Method Delhi’s first 18+ exhibition, ‘Slow Rot’, brings together ten contemporary artists to explore the grotesque through a contemporary lens, to “warp reality to expose its more sinister aspects.” The artists in this exhibition — such as Priyesh T. (of Adarsh Balak fame), Revant Dasgupta, Sajid Wajid Shaikh, and Tithi Das — present deeply personal and unsettling reflections on trauma, identity, suffering, and contemporary social anxieties through fractured and unprocessed bodies of work.

These works engage with the invisible emotional labour underpinning domestic and social structures, satirise prevailing social norms and popular culture, evoke conflict, aggression, and cyclical violence, and offer an uncensored portrayal of societal struggles that often go unnoticed, inviting viewers to question the underlying causes of oppression and resistance.

The artists in ‘Slow Rot’ return to the grotesque as a visual language capable of articulating contemporary fears and anxieties — a response to a historical moment in which the best of humanity seems irretrievably behind us, and what once felt new and hopeful now appears exhausted and decrepit. From Priyesh T.’s subversive ‘Telerubbies’, which subverts the beloved children’s television programme into something unsettling, to Tithi Das’s ‘Untitled’ painting of figures that appear to be mother and child, except not quite, the exhibition’s irreverent, desperate works signal both the re-entry of popular visual culture into spaces traditionally reserved for “high art” and the enduring relevance of the grotesque as a mode of cultural critique in our post-fact, post-future, post-internet age.

‘Slow Rot’ is on view at Method Delhi until 3 July 2026. Learn more here.

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