In Vinayak Sarwankar’s paintings, the playground has become an improbable stage. Dinosaurs wander past slides. Cartoonish figures appear beside monkey bars. The structures are recognisable from any childhood, yet they carry a slight distortion, as if remembered through a dream rather than observed in daylight.
His debut solo exhibition, Woke Up a Dinosaur, curated by Anica Mann and presented by LOAM in Mumbai, approaches childhood less as nostalgia and more as a psychological landscape. The works circle around the early imaginative worlds many people inhabited before adulthood imposed structure and caution. They return to that territory without smoothing its edges.
Sarwankar traces the project not to a single memory but to a scatter of impressions that lingered over time.
“Woke Up a Dinosaur does not originate from a single childhood memory, but rather from a collection of small fragments that have stayed with me over time,” he says. “These include moments of play, imagination, confusion, and emotional experiences. In childhood, the boundaries between imagination and reality often feel fluid.”
That fluidity runs through the exhibition. Dinosaurs, fictional characters and playground equipment exist within the same painted world without explanation. What might appear whimsical at first glance carries a faint disquiet. The creatures do not fully belong to the environment, and yet their presence feels natural within the logic of childhood imagination.
The playground forms the central architecture of the exhibition. For Sarwankar, it operates as both setting and symbol.
“As children, ordinary structures like slides, see-saws, and monkey bars often become entire worlds where reality and fantasy blend effortlessly,” he explains. “By placing prehistoric creatures and fictional characters within these spaces, I explore how childhood transforms familiar environments into sites of adventure and possibility.”
Those structures, seen through the eyes of an adult, acquire a different charge. The slide appears smaller. The monkey bars look rigid. What once felt limitless becomes framed by the awareness of scale and restriction. The paintings lean into that tension between childhood expansiveness and the self-consciousness that arrives later.
For the curator Anica Mann, the exhibition touches a shared visual vocabulary shaped by popular culture and the South Asian childhood of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“Sentimentality has many layers of recognisable references to collective popular culture,” she says. “This exhibition records that gaze through the works of Vinayak.”
Sarwankar grew up in the years following India’s economic liberalisation, when global cartoon imagery filtered rapidly into local childhoods. Disney characters, comic book figures and prehistoric monsters circulated across television screens and school notebooks. Dinosaurs, in particular, acquired an outsized presence in a child’s imagination.
In Woke Up a Dinosaur, they return as heroic companions rather than museum specimens.
“The dinosaur is the hero, the aspirational strength of a child that is coming into their power by associating with the dinosaur,” Mann says. “It’s the most relatable symbol of historic might.”
That sense of heroic scale contrasts sharply with the fragile mark-making Sarwankar employs. The paintings retain a deliberately primitive quality. Figures appear loosely outlined, as though sketched with the urgency of a child filling a notebook. Beneath that simplicity lies a more complex emotional register.
Sarwankar describes the work as an attempt to hold multiple emotional states at once.
“When we think of childhood, we often remember the playfulness and imagination, but there is also a quieter emotional layer beneath it, moments of confusion or vulnerability that we couldn’t fully articulate at that age,” he says. “The paintings try to hold both states at once.”
The darker tonalities in the work hint at that submerged layer. Black forms creep into otherwise bright compositions. Surfaces accumulate texture, suggesting memory’s tendency to blur and distort its own material. What begins as a playful image often ends in a slightly unsettled mood.
Mann views this return to childhood imagery as a counterpoint to the pace of contemporary life.
“In an overstimulated world, Vinayak’s works recall analogue triggers of emotion and creativity,” she says. “Simpler times that served as a refuge for many children.”
Yet the exhibition avoids romanticising that refuge. Childhood in Sarwankar’s work carries its own uncertainties. The creatures that populate the paintings feel protective and strange at the same time. They resemble imaginary friends that followed a child through those early experiments with emotion and identity.
The show also invites an unusual mix of audiences. It is presented alongside a children’s art event, allowing younger visitors to encounter the paintings directly rather than through the filter of adult interpretation.
For Sarwankar, that accessibility emerged organically.
“When I was younger, places like slides or monkey bars felt limitless, almost like stages for invented stories and creatures,” he says. “Because of that, the paintings seem to speak to children through imagination, while adults often connect to them through nostalgia and reflection.”
At the exhibition opening, the response from visitors suggested that divide might not be as firm as expected.
“Parents, young adults, adults and toddlers all scribbled on the wall of the show in abandon,” Mann recalls. “To find their original hand and its tactility.”
It was a small gesture, yet revealing. The act of drawing something simple on a wall can feel oddly unfamiliar to an adult hand trained by years of restraint.
Sarwankar’s paintings seem to hover in that same territory. They revisit the moment before that restraint settled in, when imagination expanded freely and the playground could accommodate anything from a cartoon character to a prehistoric giant.
In Woke Up a Dinosaur, those creatures return briefly to the scene. They stand beside slides and see-saws, companions from a time when the world still felt elastic, waiting for someone to climb onto the monkey bars and invent it again.
Opening: February 28, 2026, 2 pm onwards
Venue: Method. Kala Ghoda, Fort Mumbai
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