From ecological grief to digital drift: watercolour conversations at The Quiet Fluid exhibition in Hyderabad

Across painting traditions, the choice of medium has always shaped how artists think, feel, and build images. Oil lends itself to depth and slow layering; acrylic brings speed and immediacy; tempera asks for control and patience. Watercolour sits somewhere else entirely—less fixed, more responsive. With the way it moves and stains, it resists being fully controlled. In that sense, it feels closer to a conversation than a method, where the artist proposes and the medium answers.

Artists at The Quiet Fluid use watercolour’s fluid uncertainty to explore memory, technology, and the Anthropocene, revealing images as records of becoming rather than fixed scenes

Watercolour, often seen as delicate, carries a long and layered history—from manuscript illumination and East Asian ink practices to European landscape traditions and the lyricism of the Bengal School. The Quiet Fuild, an ongoing exhibition in the city focuses on the medium and its sentimentalities. As curator Ruchi Sharma says, “its language is one of complexity, where water becomes an active agent, guiding pigment into forms that balance intention with chance.” That balance is key. The work unfolds in its making.

The exhibition brings together artists who lean into this quality, allowing watercolour to exist as a complete, self-sufficient practice. Showcasing artists like Anupama Alias Anil, Avijit Dutta, Claire Iono, Ganesh Das, Jahangir Asgar Jani Kaushik Raha, Laxmipriya Panigrahi, Manisha Agarwal, Nishant Dange, Paresh Thukrul, Pradosh Paul, Prafulla Mohanti, Sandip Roy, Sanjoy Patra, Srinivas Mancha, Srinivas Pulagam , Subrata Paul, Sujith S N, Sunil M Lohar, it delves into how pigment seeps into paper, edges blur, forms gather and disperse. Ruchi describes these moments as “at once precise and ephemeral—where the act of making remains visible, suspended in time.” There’s a sense that nothing is entirely fixed. Landscapes dissolve into atmosphere, figures appear and recede, and abstraction carries something internal, almost unspoken. What we see, as she puts it, is “not merely an image, but a record of becoming.”

For Ganesh Das, this sense of becoming is tied closely to landscape — not just as a place, but as memory and tension. Having grown up near Santiniketan, he recalls how “this early exposure fostered a sustained engagement with nature.” That grounding stays with him, even as his later experiences in cities complicate it. Urban expansion, ecological loss — these realities enter the work as a quiet disturbance. He speaks of “a sense of displacement and longing for ecological balance,” which comes through in layered compositions that combine botanical imagery with references to miniature painting, maps, and urban signs. His works feel like they are holding two times at once.

Avijit Dutta’s concerns are more internal, though no less shaped by the present. “My works emerge from instinctive responses to the contradictions embedded in everyday existence, especially the uneasy overlap between physical reality and the accelerating world of technology and AI,” he shares. There’s a sense, he suggests, that emotion itself is thinning out. Through tempera — a medium that doesn’t allow haste — he tries “to hold these opposing states in delicate balance.” The works don’t resolve tension; they sit with it.

Manisha Agrawal approaches the ecological question more directly. Working within the broader context of the Anthropocene, she translates research into images that are immediate and hard to ignore. “The visuals take center stage,” she notes, and they do so with clarity. A tiger enclosed within a jar, for instance, is both surreal and disturbingly plausible. It points to containment, loss, and urgency all at once. Her work becomes “an instrument of ecological awareness,” but without losing its visual pull.

Sanjoy Patra shifts the focus again — this time to the digital rhythms of everyday life. Watching people around him, he notes, “I observe people so deeply engrossed in their social life,” especially as it plays out through

screens. His work draws from these small, familiar moments, where attention is divided and presence feels partial. There’s no overt critique, just a steady observation of how we live now.

Taken together, these practices open up watercolour in unexpected ways.

It’s no longer just about lightness or fragility. If anything, it resists permanence, control, and excess. As Ruchi shares, it reveals itself “not as fragile, but as quietly enduring.” And perhaps that’s where its strength lies — in its ability to hold complexity without forcing it into certainty.

Free entry.

On till April 28, 11am to 7 pm.

At Kalakriti Art Gallery, Banjara Hills.

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