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Paresh Maity’s latest exhibition, ‘Luminous Terrains’, at Bikaner House, New Delhi, traces the artist’s lifelong pursuit of light across India and the world. In conversation with Homegrown, Maity speaks about the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic tensions shaping his monumental landscapes and their place in contemporary Indian art.
“Light is life… it is everything,” Paresh Maity says.
There are artists for whom light is an element — one aspect of a composition, a visual device to create mood, or a tool to sculpt their subject. And then there is Paresh Maity, for whom light is the foundational element of the world. Days before the opening preview of his much-anticipated solo exhibition, ‘Luminous Terrains’, presented by Art Alive Gallery at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Bikaner House, New Delhi, the prolific multidisciplinarian tells me: “Light is the most essential part of everything. Imagine a day without light. How would you feel?”
The landmark exhibition, Maity’s 93rd solo show over nearly five decades of practice, draws from his travels across India, Europe, and most recently Africa, tracing a universal but also profoundly personal cartography of a singular artistic practice transformed by light. The show opens with a preview on Saturday, 28 February 2026, alongside the launch of a monograph on the artist with contributions by eminent authors Partha Mitter and Kishore Singh. It arrives as both a landmark moment for Art Alive Gallery’s 25th anniversary and a culmination of Maity’s five-decades-long artistic journey rooted in relentless movement across continents and disciplines.
Born in Tamluk, a moffusil town in rural West Bengal, Maity’s life and practice were shaped by travel from his formative years. As a young art student in the 1980s, he could not afford to stay in Kolkata, where he studied at the Government College of Art. “I was moulded by travel,” Maity says. “I had no money to stay in Kolkata, so I had to travel almost 200 kilometres every day for six years from 1983 till 1989. I’d travel by local trains, on the back of trucks, on a bicycle. I took inspiration from those journeys.”
A lot has changed for Maity since then, but he is still inspired by travel. “Earlier this year, I was in Africa on vacation with my family,” Maity recalls. “It was a sunny day, it was hot, and suddenly I saw this beautiful dark cloud coming towards me across the savannah, those barren flatlands. I saw the clouds, the sky, the rainbow. Nature at its most magnificent. I was completely mesmerised. The next day I told my family I was going to rest. But I wanted to stay alone and paint.”
In the Indian contemporary art scene — dynamic, expanding, and increasingly global — Maity represents a rare and rigourous commitment to consistency. He is preoccupied with one of the oldest domains of visual arts: the landscape. From his early watercolours on paper to the monumental oil and acrylic canvases in recent years, he has persistently refused the distraction of trends, discursive provocation, and obscurantist conceptualism in his paintings.
‘Luminous Terrains’ reflects Maity’s lifelong engagement with light as both subject and structure. As writer and curator Kishore Singh writes, Maity “pays ode to Claude Monet and Édouard Manet, to Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Camille Pissarro — not borrowing but building on their foundations to offer an Indian interpretation of light and colour.” The works reveal the nuanced geographies of illumination: the crystalline clarity of South France and Venice contrasts with the denser, dust-filtered light of India, rendered almost tactile in Maity’s deft hand.
Maity’s practice exists within the same lineage as Impressionists and post-Impressionists in his zeal for capturing both the physical and emotional effects of light. “I would say that their way of thinking and my way of thinking is the same,” he says. “I go out of the studio, I sit down by the lagoon, by the ghats, by the backwaters, and I try to capture. There’s a direct transformation that happens when I see and I capture the light, the moment, the essence of the moment and the place.”
“Do you ever take reference images?” I ask him.
“No,” Maity is quick to answer. “Either I do it on the spot, or I do sketches and drawings and try to memorise everything. I have a very photographic memory so it comes back like a dream. It’s like a conversation between nature, me, and my canvas.”
If Maity’s early watercolours were intimate and immediate, his recent canvases are monumental in scale and ambition. The largest piece in ‘Luminous Terrains’ is 45-feet-long — a spiritual encounter, both for the artist and his audience. Maity speaks of standing in front of the empty canvas as a kind of existential confrontation: “You don’t know from where to start, where to end. You don’t know what is going to happen.” He doesn’t draw before he paints, even on these massive surfaces. The work “emerges,” he says, slowly, unpredictably, almost with a life of its own.
Their scale, too, has a spiritual quality of its own. I remember standing in front of Maity’s ‘Urbanscape’ — a massive jackfruit cast in bronze — at the inaugural Bengal Biennale in 2024, and I take this opportunity to ask him about his experimentation with scale.
“I always wanted to make large watercolours, which is the most difficult medium,” he says. “I have done watercolours that are eight feet across. In fact, I completed a 100-feet work a few months back,” he adds. “There are many challenges when you work at that scale. You get lost. When you are standing in front of a 45-feet-long canvas, you are entering unknown territory.”
Maity uses the analogy of a small hill and the Himalayas to put things in perspective. “Once you have climbed both, you see the difference in scale,” he says. “Last time, I had a 7-feet by 45-feet canvas. This time, there’s an 8-feet by 45-feet canvas,” he says, referring to his last solo exhibition, ‘Infinite Light’, held at the same venue in March 2022. “I always want to give people something new.”
There is something vulnerable in the way Maity describes his ambitions even now.
This idea extends beyond painting to his sculptures and installations such as ‘Urbanscape’, presented at the 2024-2025 Bengal Biennale, and ‘Moksha’, displayed at Art Mumbai last year. His goal is “to transform anything, everything into a piece of art,” he says, “because art is life, life is art. Art is the mirror of our society, our civilisation. Without art, nothing exists.”
Once again, he comes up with another analogy. “It’s like milk,” he says. “My art is evolving constantly. It’s changing from milk to curd, to paneer, to butter, to ghee. It’s changing all the time, spontaneously, without breaking the link. The expression might be different, but the source is milk.”
Five decades in, Maity is as hungry as ever. Despite nearly fifty years of practice, acclaim, and a staggering 93 solo exhibitions worldwide, he says he is still searching. His practice has been marked by ruptures: from a prodigious watercolourist in the 1980s, to his foray into oils, acrylics, and sculptures in the 1990s, and large-scale murals and installations in the 2010s. “My ambition, my vision was to be an artist and create art, to give joy and happiness through my art to the whole world. That was my ambition, my wish. And if I continue to do that till the last day of my life, I will be very happy and successful, I think,” he says.
