Ashni Singh

b. 2002, India

Lives and works in Jaipur, Rajasthan

Ashni Singh’s practice emerges from an intimate observation of the everyday. Working primarily with oil paints and oil pastels, Singh constructs visual narratives that oscillate between comfort and discomfort, the familiar and the unsettling. Her work illuminates the ways in which domesticity reveals itself as both sanctuary and site of scrutiny, where the mundane becomes a stage for exploring the complexities of identity, intimacy, femininity, and selfhood.

Singh’s artistic inquiry is deeply rooted in the specificity of her context while simultaneously reaching toward universal themes of human connection. She explores the rituals and rhythms of childhood, the weight and wonder of growing into yourself, and the ways in which intimacy is constructed, maintained, and sometimes fractured. Her compositions often contain an element of playfulness that contrasts with their deeper themes of moral policing, societal expectations, and the invisible structures that govern behaviour, particularly in relation to gender and propriety. Humour and satire emerge as essential tools in Singh’s practice, allowing her to address weighty themes with a lightness that makes them more penetrable without diminishing their significance. 

Singh’s choice of mediums allows for a visual language that mirrors her thematic concerns. Singh’s relationship with her chosen mediums comes from a deeply considered intuition: oil paint features primarily, its luscious vividness echoing her thematic investigations into the blurring of boundaries between self and environment, interior and exterior worlds. Her work in oil pastels showcase the restlessness in her practice, seizing moments of imagination with spontaneity and directness. Together, they allow Singh to navigate between reflection and impulse, between the carefully observed and the intuitively felt, a duality that runs through all her explorations of identity, relation, and the seen and unseen aspects of daily life. Her mark-making ranges from delicate and tentative to bold and assured, reflecting the varied emotional registers of her subjects. Through her practice, Singh constructs a visual vocabulary for articulating the unspoken- the feelings, observations, and experiences that resist easy categorization but nonetheless shape our understanding of ourselves and each other.