The oldest and newest paintings in this exhibition, made a quarter century apart, both depict alter-egos of the artist amidst the paraphernalia of daily life. The first, titled Watching, dates from her time living in the United States at the turn of the millennium, when her husband Manish had just left a lucrative job to pursue his passion for cinema, a fact alluded to near the top of the canvas. The homesick young woman in Watching finds solace in imagining her room inhabited by flowers and trees of India and the comforting presence of Lord Krishna next to her. The incongruity of the divinity on a couch is gently humorous, forestalling any lapse into sentimentality. The protagonist of Consume, a work created in 2025, stands with a jaded expression in a geometric patterned interior, a heap of items at her feet containing accessories and food but also visages, indicative, perhaps, of people treated like objects, used and discarded. Sections of the canvas reveal an under-drawing cluttered with consumer goods. This painting and its companion piece Echoes of Apathy focus upon our complicity in environmental degradation, a complicity that arises not from malevolent motives but despite our best intentions because taking our beliefs to their logical conclusion would involve sacrificing too many comforts we hold dear.

Between these bookends is a journey of many stages. We see a woman on a spiritual quest, conversing with Buddhist monks (Dharamsala); a young mother finding a morning saturated with joy in the company of her infant son (Awakening); and a pregnant, goddess-like figure contemplating raising a child in an atmosphere where faith has been politicised (Hot Air). The perils faced by two growing sons seem to require a multi-armed deity to repel (Menace); the burden of being an artist can feel too stressful (Overload and Paint); and the longing felt for home while abroad is balanced by the recognition that Indian traditions are deeply iniquitous (Words III).

As these descriptions suggest, Dhruvi’s art is rooted in autobiography. However, it usually connects with larger subjects, telling us something universal about cultural identity, motherhood, and creativity. This is nowhere more evident than her paintings about air pollution, which were triggered by a wheezing fit she suffered while training for a marathon. Airfare, a four-panel work from the Jindal collection, imagines life on a planet without natural oxygen or vegetation, where women compete for flowers to place in ‘breath packs’.

The series that includes Airfare, exhibited in 2008, was prescient, for in succeeding years the nation began following Air Quality Indexes with great interest and trepidation. Paintings like Dust to Dust, envisioning a benign cycle of life, and Mother Earth 3, celebrating the feminine principle, are further signs of the artist’s growing environmental consciousness.

The most moving and personal piece in The Journey Is Home is a scroll titled 1993-2013, a memorial to her beloved partner, who passed away in a tragic accident in 2010. Sculptures of tear drops and screaming figures mark months and years of pain that followed his passing.

The sculptures signal Dhruvi’s growing interest in ceramics, a medium through which she has extended her exploration of the comic and grotesque; of body shapes indicative of the pressure society places on women; and of mother goddess images reminiscent of stone age figurines. She remains a painter at heart, however, always adding painted details to sculptures. Her painterly practice is in turn based on a foundation of drawing, in recognition of which the show includes a substantial selection of drawings.

Sangita Jindal, whose support for the artist’s work began with Dhruvi’s very first solo show, commissioned her in 2013 to create a painting based on JSW and its charitable initiatives. This monumental canvas anchors the display, augmented by works from the collections of JSW, the artist herself, Chemould Prescott Road gallery, Nature Morte gallery, and an important loan from the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

The show’s title, inspired by Dhruvi’s early interest in Buddhist philosophy, is taken from a poem by the Japanese author and Zen practitioner Matsuo Basho, which includes the line, “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

Girish Shahane
Curator and Art critic