Ns harsha biography

N.S.
N.
Born in 1969, NS Harsha lives and works in Mysore, India.

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Mysuru-based artist NS Harsha is known for his paintings on canvas and built surfaces as well as for his site-specific installations, community-based art and sculptural work. He draws on a range of idioms — from traditional miniatures, folk and popular art, textbook illustrations and classical Western painting — to produce witty, satirical and absurdist visual narratives. He completed a BFA in painting at the Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA) in Mysuru in 1992, followed by an MFA from MS University, Baroda, in 1995, where he was mentored by Nilima Sheikh.

Harsha is best known for his paintings characterised by delicate and detailed figures rendered with fine brushwork in flat colours and singular pictorial planes. His works are philosophical and political reflections on the impact of globalisation, current affairs and geopolitical forces in local and vernacular contexts. Harsha also explores the tensions between the individual and the collective, especially in his monumental narrative-figural paintings that consist of vast areas of flat space populated by a multitude of

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Born in 1969, N.S. Harsha completed a bachelor’s of fine arts in painting from the Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA), Mysore, and a master’s of fine arts in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda.

His recent solo exhibitions and projects have taken place at international venues, including Stomach Studio, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India (2022); Recent Life, Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, India (2020); Gathering Delights, CHAT (Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile), Hong Kong, China (2019); NS Harsha, Victoria Miro, London, UK (2019); Facing, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK (2018); Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2017); the Dallas Museum of Art (2015–2016); DAAD, as part of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (2012–2013); INIVA, London (2009); and at Maison Hermes Tokyo (2008), among other noteworthy participations. Harsha’s work has featured in group exhibitions including the Kochi–Muziris Biennale, India (2014); Moscow Biennial of Contempo

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Artes Mundi 2008: NS Harsha

His work reveals a political commentary within a framework of Indian miniature painting, the modern Indian narrative tradition and popular art.

The figures in Harsha's delicate, sly and playful world are almost invariably focused on an event, animated by a mutual curiosity, pointing out something that is odd, incongruous or comically strange. For the viewer the wit resides as much in the scale of the depictions as it does in the finely summarised telling detail of the vignette.

Harsha's oeuvre includes painting, large scale installations and community projects. In his recent work Cosmic Orphans (2006) a site-specific painting installation at the Sri Krishnan Temple created for the Singapore Biennale, Harsha covered the entire surface of the rooftop above the inner sanctum and the floor surrounding the temple's tower with paintings of sleeping figures.

Painted directly onto the floor using flat colours, the figures occupy a space not normally associated with traditional painting - their displacement provoking the audience to consider w