Raj Rewal’s works on paper arrive at Akara Modern in Mumbai

Inside Raj Rewal’s drawings, politicians share space with courtly figures, bureaucrats drift across coloured grids, and fragments of contemporary India collide with references pulled from mythology and history. The scenes feel crowded but controlled, arranged with the precision of someone accustomed to thinking through space. Even at their most playful, the works carry the underlying logic of architecture.

Even at their most playful, the works of Raj Rewal carry the underlying logic of architecture

“Architectural drawings are a means to the end product of built forms and spaces,” Rewal said recently. “My paintings, on the other hand, are self-sufficient.”

At Akara’s upcoming exhibition Raj Rewal: Drawn Worlds, opening on 15th May in Colaba, that distinction becomes less straightforward than it first appears. The exhibition gathers a selection of Rewal’s drawings and paintings from recent years, many of them crowded with bureaucrats, performers, rulers and anonymous urban characters. Though detached from the demands of construction, the works remain deeply architectural in the way they organise movement, tension and narrative within space.

For decades, Rewal’s public identity has been shaped by buildings. His name carries the weight of institutional architecture in post-Independence India, tied to conversations around climate-responsive design and civic modernism. The drawings at Akara reveal another register of thinking altogether. Here, structure loosens. Humour enters. History folds into contemporary spectacle.

In one work, water carriers and domestic labourers move through fragmented planes of colour. In another, politicians become actors inside compositions that resemble both city maps and stage sets. The drawings borrow from Indian and Persian miniature traditions, though flashes of Bauhaus geometry and modernist abstraction keep surfacing through the grids.

Puneet Shah, co-founder of Akara, said the exhibition emerged from a desire to reconsider how Rewal’s drawing practice has been viewed alongside his architecture. “The decision to foreground Raj Rewal’s drawing practice at this moment stems from the recognition that his drawings are not separate from his architecture, but an extension of it,” Shah said.

That extension reveals itself less through subject matter than through method. Rewal builds his images the way an architect might approach a city: through layers, intervals and carefully negotiated relationships between figures and structures. Yet the drawings resist the clarity associated with architectural plans. Their meanings remain unstable. Scenes drift between irony and observation, between memory and invention.

The exhibition’s installation follows a similarly deliberate approach. Rather than arranging the works chronologically, Akara has allowed visual echoes and recurring motifs to guide the experience of the space. Shah described the curatorial approach as a way to create “a slower, immersive experience” for viewers moving through the gallery.

What lingers after seeing the works is their sense of restlessness. Rewal’s drawings do not seek resolution. They observe public life with amusement, scepticism and occasional tenderness, turning the rigid logic of architectural grids into spaces where history, politics and human behaviour continue colliding in unpredictable ways.

What: Raj Rewal: Drawn Worlds

When: May 15, 2026 onwards

Where: Akara Modern

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