Biography
Born in New Delhi, India, Preeti Varma is a New York-based visual artist. For 18 years, she maintained a career spanning major urban centers, including Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Singapore. Varma's history of navigating disparate geographies provided the foundational inspiration for her investigation into the fluidity of physical and psychological space one experiences in such displacement. In 2009, responding to a long-standing artistic calling, she transitioned to a full-time professional art practice.
Varma earned a Bachelor of Arts (Honors) from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2014. In 2015, she relocated to New York City to further her studio practice, engaging with the city's creative landscape at The Art Students League of New York. While at the League, her work was recognized with the Kuniyoshi Grant for painting and the John M. Regan Jr. Scholarship for mixed media.
Since 2011, Varma’s work has been showcased in exhibitions and international art fairs across the United States and Singapore. Noteworthy highlights include her first NYC solo show in 2017 and two subsequent solo exhibitions. Her work has also been featured at Art on Paper 2019 (New York City), the Texas Contemporary Art Fair 2018 (Houston), the LA Art Show 2018, and the Affordable Art Fair Singapore (2015). Varma’s work is held in private collections across the United States and internationally.
Artist Statement
My work explores how migration, displacement, and shifting cultural identities shape our experience of space, memory, and belonging. Having lived and worked across multiple geographies over the past twenty-five years, I am interested in how movement between places becomes internalized as perception, emotional landscape, and a constantly evolving sense of home- what I think of as a perpetual state of arrival.
I work across painting and mixed media to investigate these layered conditions. In my paintings, using oil, oil stick, and oil pastel, forms accumulate, dissolve, and reconfigure across the canvas, creating environments where organic, architectural, and mechanical elements merge. Through processes of layering, interruption, and erasure, the compositions evolve into shifting spatial systems that hover between landscape, structure, and organism. These configurations engage with the tensions that emerge in cities shaped by migration, where visibility and presence are constantly negotiated.
My mixed-media works draw from close observation of the urban environment. Combining photography with wax on delicate rice paper, I trace overlooked fragments of the built landscape- temporary repairs, worn surfaces, and infrastructural traces that function as material witnesses to the movement of people through the city. Through layering and abstraction, these works transform ordinary urban observations into tactile records of environments shaped by adaptation and change.
Ultimately, these works consider lived space as a layered terrain where memory and identity accumulate, fragment, and persist.