In a city accustomed to speed, spectacle and constant arrival, Seeing From the Inside Out proposes a different tempo. Opening at Akara Contemporary this January, Utkarsh Makwana’s new exhibition unfolds like a long, attentive breath, measured, reflective, and richly inhabited by thought. The works do not clamour for attention; they draw you inward, asking for patience and proximity, for the kind of looking that mirrors the way memory itself operates.
Makwana, who was born in 1989 and trained at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, has built a practice anchored in observation, of domestic rituals, fleeting encounters, inherited myths, and the small decisions that quietly contour inner life. His paintings locate these moments within dense, layered compositions that feel at once personal and archetypal. Figures travel, pause, gather, entangle themselves in patterns; landscapes stretch and fold back into rooms; architecture appears less as structure than as mental scaffolding.
The exhibition’s title offers a useful entry point. For Makwana, the interior world is never sealed off from the external one. “For me, feelings, memories, or thoughts translate to pictures through symbols, patterns, and everyday objects that show inner life on the outside,” he explains. “A private doubt or an old talk becomes a large landscape or a small ritual, mixing real life with myths.” In works such as Morning Rituals or Journey, shaving brushes, prayer spaces and pathways hold entire emotional histories, rendered with a precision that rewards slow attention.
While Makwana draws deeply from miniature painting traditions, particularly their intimacy, narrative density and devotion to detail, his works resist nostalgia. Scale expands when it needs to; compositions breathe. Large-format paintings allow narratives to sprawl and accumulate, their surfaces animated by repetition and rhythm. “When a viewer is in front of a large work, the colours and elements overtake the viewer,” Makwana says. “It makes one feel they are just standing at a point inside the painting, making them part of it.”
Colour operates as both instinct and intelligence. Blues open onto mythic states and heightened awareness; reds carry energy and thought; yellows signal moments of clarity. These palettes are not imposed but arrived at through a dialogue between image and intuition. Architecture, long a fascination for the artist, appears as pattern, grid and passage rather than literal space, guiding the eye while suggesting cognitive routes. Hills become neural networks; buildings echo emotional enclosures.
What distinguishes Makwana’s work is its refusal to resolve into singular meaning. Narratives remain open, elastic, available for projection. Figures may seem caught mid-thought or mid-journey, their expressions withheld. Repeated motifs operate like mental loops, evoking how the mind revisits certain ideas again and again. The paintings feel lived-in rather than declared.
This sensitivity to interiority is precisely what drew Akara to Makwana at this moment. “Akara was drawn to Utkarsh Makwana’s practice because of the way his work navigates a moment of quiet urgency, one in which introspection, perception, and inner worlds feel especially relevant,” says Puneet Shah, founder of Akara. “Makwana’s paintings invite sustained looking and slow engagement.” The exhibition reflects the gallery’s broader commitment to practices that prioritise depth and contemplation over spectacle.
Since its founding in 2015, Akara has positioned itself as a bridge between South Asian modernism and contemporary practice. With its expansion into two dedicated spaces, Akara Modern and Akara Contemporary, the gallery has sharpened its focus on dialogue across generations and geographies. *Seeing From the Inside Out* sits firmly within this vision, presenting tradition as a living language rather than a static inheritance.
Makwana’s paintings ask viewers to meet them halfway. They do not explain themselves, nor do they withhold. Instead, they create conditions for recognition, of one’s own habits of thought, of remembered rituals, of the way inner landscapes shape how we move through the world. In an era saturated with images designed for immediate consumption, this exhibition makes a case for lingering, for looking again, for entering from the inside and staying there a while.
For more updates, join/follow our WhatsApp, Telegram and YouTube channels.