Self

Sharmistha Ray is a New York-based artist, writer, curator and TED Fellow whose work addresses personal identity as situated at the crossroads of migration. A product of multiple geographies, Ray has lived and worked across cities and countries including Kuwait, Berlin, London, Kolkata and Mumbai.

Between 2006 and 2016, Ray held various positions in the art world: Bodhi Art (Managing Director, 2006-10); Hauser & Wirth (Sales Director, Asia, 2011); Art Basel (VIP Representative, India, 2012-13) and Kochi Biennale Foundation (Fundraising Consultant, 2015-16). In 2000, she completed a short internship with the internationally recognized multimedia artist Jenny Holzer in Hoosick Falls, NY.

In her role as Managing Director for Bodhi Art, Ray developed a global sales and marketing platform for the international branches of the gallery in Mumbai, New Delhi, Singapore, New York and Berlin. She worked closely with major contemporary artists from India, overseeing 100+ exhibitions of art across the world at galleries, museums, biennales and art fairs. She also created close affiliations with international art collections, building portfolios of art for personal, corporate and institutional collectors. Ray was responsible for spearheading many pioneering initiatives within Indian art, including a state-of-the-art project space in Mumbai for large-scale works, the first gallery dedicated to Indian contemporary art in Europe, widespread participation in global art fairs, an online gallery and a popular monthly educational platform.

Since 2012, Ray has focused primarily on her artistic practice, broadening the range of her material practice from painting to include a diverse set of media including light installations, drawing, metalwork and sculptures. Her work confronts the social politics of womanhood, queer identity and migration, drawing from a complex weave of theoretical and aesthetic sources that include comparative histories of painting, feminist discourses, postcolonial studies, queer phenomenology, and Vedic and Buddhist philosophies. Her years in India (2006-2017) also bore witness to a critical development of her use of color and painterly strategies. She deploys bold, saturated hues to build rich, impasto surfaces that evoke the tropical imagination – its mixture of determined chaos and complete abandon.

Solo exhibitions include hidden geographies at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai (2012); Reflections + Transformations at Aicon, New York (2013); Sweet Surrender: Studies in Abstraction at Galerie Steph, Singapore (2014) and we are all islands at Nine Fish Art Gallery, Mumbai (2016) which travelled to Mill Hall, Kochi (2017) during the third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. In 2015, she was commissioned by India’s steel conglomerate JSW, to create the public art work On the Seashore of Endless Worlds. The sculpture, fabricated entirely in steel and painted, was unveiled and exhibited at the largest public arts festival in Mumbai before travelling to the southern Indian state of Karnataka where it is on permanent display.

Ray remains deeply committed to educational initiatives. Since 2014, she has run Bellevue Salons, a popular salon programme that cross-pollinates art, culture and social justice. She is a regular contributor on art for the India editions of Vogue and Elle and has been featured numerous times in both print and online versions. She also maintains a robust art consulting practice to develop key art collections with a focus on South Asia. Her interest lies in the intersection of art, aesthetics and politics.

Ray is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant (2004), TED Fellowship (2009), Montblanc Young Artist World Patronage Award (2012) and was nominated for the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship for Visual Arts (2014). She received her Bachelor of Arts from Williams College and dual degree Master of Sciences in the History of Art & Design and Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Pratt Institute, with highest honours.

She currently lives in Brooklyn. Her studio is located at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York City.