What happens when an artist stops trying to make a material conform to an image? For Meenal Singh and Sandilya Theuerkauf, the answer lies in paying closer attention to what is already there. Their exhibition Morphology, at KYNKYNY in Mumbai, brings together two practices that approach abstraction through very different materials but share an interest in how form develops.
The title refers to the study of form and the ways it changes. In Singh’s paintings, oil and pigment are allowed to pool, dissolve, overlap and move across the canvas, producing fields that can suggest geological formations, atmospheric phenomena or imagined landscapes. Theuerkauf works with bark, twigs, thorns, dried vines and other vegetal matter, arranging and reconfiguring these materials into sculptural reliefs. Neither practice begins with a fixed image. Instead, material, observation and intuition shape what eventually appears.
Singh came to painting through architecture, a training she describes as carrying its own inherited structures. “Observing nature and the way all elements of it adapt and accommodate each other, did a lot for me to get away from the fixed, colonial and patriarchal tenets of Modernism,” she says. Her engagement with a farm in Tamil Nadu, where she has been involved in reforesting land since 2014, has sharpened that attention. She describes learning from plants as a way of rebuilding “trust and wonder in natural processes”, while her paintings similarly allow pigment to behave according to its own properties.
That surrender is balanced by research. Singh studies pigments, their histories, politics and chemical processes, seeing knowledge as a foundation for experimentation. “The actual act of painting is about bringing the elements together and then allowing them the flexibility and space to become something more than the sum of their parts,” she says.
For Theuerkauf, the question comes first. “Is it possible to relate without having images?” he asks, describing a question that may never be resolved but remains important to pursue. His attention to bark, seeds and vines emerges from the same impulse: to encounter material before imposing an interpretation upon it.
Even completion remains provisional. Theuerkauf says the decision to stop a work “happens”; once finished, he can look at it almost as he would another person, observing what had been present all along.
At Morphology, abstraction becomes a method of looking. Singh and Theuerkauf offer different routes into the natural world, but both leave space for the materials to answer back.
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