Strangers in a Strange Land brings together works by Anjana Mehra and Vinod Ray Patel, from the 1970s and 1980s – two artists who used drawing to imagine worlds that feel at once intimate and unfamiliar.
VR Patel’s drawings unfold through intricate lines and tonal hatching that give rise to hybrid creatures, floating figures and curious environments. Patel’s images move between the sensual, the whimsical and the satirical. As K. G. Subramanyan wrote of his work, Patel possessed “a many-sided graphic ability that can give form to various shades of experience, ranging from the full-bloodedly sensual to the witty and the sarcastic.”
Anjana Mehra’s drawings emerge from a very different process. Working primarily in graphite, she builds dense fields of pigment before slowly erasing into them, allowing fragile forms to surface from darkness. In her work, fragments of driftwood, coral, bone-like structures and distant horizons, appear suspended in vast, atmospheric spaces. Critics writing about her work in the 1980s noted the remarkable subtlety of her tonal range and the almost meditative quality of her imagery. These drawings feel less like landscapes and more like echoes of forgotten and incompletely remembered dreams and nightmares.
Despite their contrasting sensibilities, both treated drawing as a space of discovery. Mehra’s fantastical terrains and Patel’s alien worlds each step beyond the immediate and the literal. Together, their works invite viewers into landscapes of thought and invention, where we find ourselves strangers in a strange land.