Home is where the art is

Vadehra Art Gallery’s ongoing exhibition, ‘Those who walk before me,’ is a visual voyage that blends memory, architecture, and the emotional landscapes of an artist with roots in, both India and the United States.

Presented as Indian-American artist Joya Mukerjee Logue’s first-ever solo exhibition in India, this body of work is a testament to the deep connections that echo through generations, memories, and space.

With 30 paintings in oil and watercolour, Mukerjee Logue brings together reflections of familial ties, collective recall, and a lingering sense of home.

Walk through memory

The work is simultaneously rich and subdued, employing an earthen palette that immediately signals a rootedness in the natural and architectural environments that defined the artist’s ancestral home in Ambala, Haryana.

A deep sense of atmosphere permeates her work, drawing on the transparency of light and the interplay of shadows that hover over colonial architecture.

In her hands, colours are not merely shades, but they evoke sensations — terracotta, beiges, and muted tones speak of a past touched by the present. It seems that light is the most prominent texture in her works, underlining the absence of boundaries and the soft-edged fluidity of her figures.

Mukerjee Logue’s artistic practice is deeply personal. Her paintings take inspiration from an early morning walk around her ancestral home in Ambala, a place where her family has resided for generations. “The collection is inspired by an early morning walk around the streets where our family home is.

It is a home where I spent most of my childhood. Walking through that bazaar again was like retracing the same paths my ancestors and parents walked,” she reflects. This sense of continuity, where past and present coalesce, drives the emotional core of her work.

Architectural time and shared spaces

In the exhibition, space takes on a profound significance. “Space is very strong in my work — architectural spaces, outdoor spaces, and also the empty spaces,” she shares. The artist’s careful attention to detail imbues a quietness in her scenes, where spaces — gardens, streets, courtyards — become much more than backdrops for the figures they frame. They become containers for memories and vessels for generational experience. “The streets may change, the shops may change, but the spaces remain,” says Mukerjee Logue, highlighting the temporal overlap between present-day realities and ancestral echoes.

What makes these spaces even more poignant is the artist’s commitment to depicting them with flatness and gestural strokes. There is a subtlety in her method — figures are not individuated but are part of a larger collective. “My paintings don’t necessarily capture the past or the present specifically, but rather a compilation of experiences across generations,” she notes. Indeed, her pieces evoke the feeling of witnessing something at once intimate and universal. The figures, often in calm postures, seem to blend into their environments, becoming part of the spaces they occupy. There are no hard edges — everything is soft, as though time itself has smoothed over the boundaries between past and present, personal and communal.

Mukerjee Logue’s ‘Night at Sadar Bazar, Ambala Cantt’ is an excellent example of this. The painting captures a serene evening scene, bathed in the warm, ambient light of old-world lampposts, a reminder of colonial architectural design. The figures — men, women, and children — are gathered in conversation, frozen in a moment that feels both quiet and full of life. They are not individuals, but rather representations of the familial bonds that Mukerjee Logue seeks to explore. “The figures represent sisterhood, brotherhood, and community,” she says, emphasising that these scenes are not about specific people, but about the concepts they embody.

Cultural fusion

The artist’s mixed cultural background further informs her vision, adding layers of complexity to her work. Born to an Indian father and an American mother, Mukerjee Logue embodies a dual identity, which seeps into her art. “India, for me, was a feeling of home. I immediately felt connected,” she recalls. This connection is at the heart of her paintings — her choice of faded, earthy colours speaks of a sensory experience she associates with India. “When I’m in India, I’m drawn to the terracotta, the clay, the muted tones. These are the colours that stand out to me when I’m here.”

Though deeply personal, the artworks resonate universally with anyone who has experienced the passage of time and memory within their own family. Speaking to this, she explains, “In our family, because we are all spread out across the world and parts of India, it feels like sometimes the memories and experiences are scattered, so I feel like I am a collector of those, bringing them together in a painting. If my family members saw my painting, they would all have something to relate to. They would probably all see Ambala, the hint of our family home, and the sense of community, and closeness we had when we were there.” This emotional layering is what gives her paintings such intimacy, connecting generations through shared spaces and experiences.

Visitors to the exhibition have remarked on the simplicity and intimacy of the scenes she paints. “It’s as if they were looking at someone’s intimate conversation or moment,” Mukerjee Logue recollects, reflecting on the reactions to her work. This simplicity belies the richness of the emotional and cultural layers that underpin her paintings — while the figures may seem distant, the sense of closeness and shared experience is palpable.

With ‘those who walk before me,’ Mukerjee Logue offers a meditation on memory, space, and time, all rendered in a visual language that is both ethereal and grounded. Her work speaks to the power of spaces — whether they are physical, like the streets of Ambala, or emotional, like the shared experiences of a family — to shape and define who we are. And through her fluid brushstrokes, muted palette, and delicate compositions, she preserves not just the memory of a place, but the feeling of home itself.

This article is written by Prachi Satrawal