Aparna Sarkar

Aparna Sarkar is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Mathematics from Pomona College. Awards include selection for the 2022 Saatchi Art Rising Stars Report, inclusion in the 2019 editorial selection of Art Maze Magazine, and the 2018 Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Full Fellowship to attend Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Aparna has also attended residencies at VCCA, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, MASS MoCA, and the Jentel Foundation, among others. She had recent two-person shows at Stowaway Gallery in LA, My Pet Ram Gallery in New York, and Peep Projects in Philadelphia, and a solo show at TV Projects in Brooklyn. Her work has been reviewed in the Brooklyn Rail. Aparna's practice also encompasses drawing, printmaking, and ceramics. She is a curator with the collectively run Manhattan gallery, Below Grand, and currently teaches in the Art department at Williams College.

In this new series of paintings, Aparna starts working from a small selection of her grandfather’s film photos of historic sites from the 50s-80s as he travelled across India. She combines these images with film stills and modern/contemporary sculptures that she encounters regularly between New York and Massachusetts, pointing to the ways that decorative forms have been exchanged and transformed through time. Aparna's work moves between the bodily and the historical, the sensory present and the inherited past. Through her expressive mark-making, she brings decoration, particularly its longstanding traditions in the East, into the conversation of geometric abstraction and gestural painting. The soft grids of textiles become an alternative to Western minimalism's rigid ones.

EXHIBITION:
CONDUCTOR Art Fair, solo presentation, 2026
Off-Kilter with Halsey McKay, 2025