Sunil Padwal || Seeing is done by another part of the body (continuum), || 2026 Rotring pen, Micron pen, pencil, charcoal, ink on paper 
Art

At TARQ in Mumbai, a group exhibition finds urgency in repetition, fragments and the slow accumulation of meaning

Brick by Brac is a group exhibition which brings together ten artists from across India and the United States

Esha Aphale

Piece by piece, the work in “Brick by Brac” feels private, inward-looking, formally eccentric, at times almost obsessive. Drawings proliferate into systems. Found images return in altered forms. Photographs pile up into loose archives of memory and place. Yet the larger questions circling the exhibition never recede. Questions about labour and attention. About how artists absorb the pressures of the cities, histories and visual cultures around them. About what it means to keep making, steadily, amid an art world increasingly organised around scale, speed and visibility.

Brick by Brac, conceived by artists Tom Burckhardt and Sameer Kulavoor, brings together works by ten artists

Opening this week at TARQ, the exhibition is conceived by artists Tom Burckhardt and Sameer Kulavoor, and brings together works by Amy Sillman, Matthew Northridge, Sameer Kulavoor, Sharon Horvath, Shruti Mahajan, Sunil Padwal, Tim Davis, Tom Burckhardt, T. Venkanna and Vishwa Shroff. Across drawing, collage, photography, film and mixed media, the exhibition traces what the curators describe as “incrementalism, repetitiveness, sequentiality and multiplicity.”

Shruti Mahajan || KaaGazaat 2, 2026 Drawing,marking, stitching and collage with found family correspondence on paper

Sillman’s restless marks seem to think aloud on paper. Northridge reshuffles found graphic fragments into crumbling architectural scenes. Kulavoor’s “Blur Memo” transforms a monthly memo pad into an extended drawing sequence shaped by the collapsing rhythms of urban life. Horvath assembles decades of magazine imagery into sprawling wall installations, while Mahajan turns letters, scripts and wooden tools into objects that hover between language and abstraction. Padwal’s layered line drawings fold memory into repetition. Davis presents a vast table of photographs from upstate New York that viewers are invited to handle and reorder. Burckhardt cuts and reassembles pages from books into unstable narrative fragments. Venkanna returns obsessively to recurring figures and gestures, and Shroff maps the erosion of a wall through drawings tied to the Fibonacci sequence and Sanskrit poetic structures.

The exhibition’s conversations move across geographies and temperaments. “There is a sequentiality, and a wry sense of humour, in the works of Amy Sillman, Vishwa Shroff and ours,” the curators observe, while artists like Shruti Mahajan, Sunil Padwal and Sharon Horvath approach memory and found imagery through entirely different visual registers.

“Putting this show together has been a way to reflect on and share the practices of our peers and our own, minus the noise that seems to surround contemporary art,” the curators write. Elsewhere, they ask: “How did the artist arrive here? Where did it begin, and how long did it take?” In “Brick by Brac,” those questions linger in the air, moving quietly between the works, turning process itself into the exhibition’s real material.

What: Brick by Brac

When: Thursday, 28thMay2026 | 06:00 pm –09:00 pm Show continues till Saturday, 04th July2026

Where: TARQ

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