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 practice encompasses multidisciplinary genres, including oil painting, mixed media, and photography. My work is profoundly informed by my experience as a migrant over the last twenty-five years. Living and working across new and vastly different geographies has been a vital catalyst in shaping my exploration of identity, human connections, memory, and belonging. This journey of migration has awakened in me an attunement to the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, turning my artistic process into a mode of inquiry for observing, navigating, and distilling the tangible interventions in the spaces I inhabit and seek resonance with.
In my mixed media works, I trace the objective reality of our built environment along with the serendipitous poetic formations found within its unseen crevices and edges. By amalgamating photography and wax on delicate rice paper, I translate seemingly mundane urban observations into meditative, transformative abstractions. These works serve as material witnesses to a life lived in a state of perpetual arrival and inquiry. They document the quiet, persistent histories of the overlooked, reflecting the resilience and intangible weight found within the ephemeral. My intent is to use this process of abstraction to ground transitionary experiences, transmuting fleeting sensory data into a tactile connection with the environment.
Parallel to this, my oil paintings function as a stream of consciousness in which memory and cultural heritage inform the articulation of an internal geography. I explore the convergence of sensory data akin to carrying fragments of one place into the next as sedimentary layers. Guided by impulse, intuition, and the unknown, I lean into the viscosity of the oil to anchor the apparent lightness of movement. By contrasting color blocks, dense tactile surfaces, and unresolved forms with open spaces and personal motifs, I articulate the tensions between stability and flux while offering a space to search for a sense of place within the self.