Biography

    Ritu Chopra is a professional painter based out of Agra, Uttar Pradesh. Growing up in the spiritually and culturally rich city of Ujjain always had an impact on her creative thought process. In 1986, she started her art journey with a group show at Kalidas Academy in Ujjain with paintings that depicted women doing their day to day household chores and working on the street as labourers. Since then, female forms, as a subject, keep immersing in her paintings. She has done eight solo and 45 group exhibitions in India and abroad. She has worked on different subjects and medium. Her style of paintings in the past remained mostly figurative, but now she has started abstract paintings too. ‘WARP n WEFT’ (India Habitat Center, New Delhi, 2016) is Ritu Chopra’s new series. It is her cherished initiative for synthesising the traditional and the modern values; the sum total of the spiritual and secular influences that she gathered so far. By adding vibrant textures, created by fabric, she freely changes the orientation to express the gradation of colour and illumination. Kabir, famous for his couplets and simple poetry, is the inspirational force that motivates her new series, this once in the abstract. As Kabir likens the woven fabric to life made of five essential elements, Ritu uses it in metaphorical and imagery, staying true to the balance and rhythm in composition and harmony in colour. The starting point of her paintings is a lingering thought. A feeling of something intangible, something that she can sense but cannot put my hand on. When the feeling gets substantially intense, she usually places a blank canvas, staring at it for long periods of time. Shapes, colours, shadows and flash through her mind during the process as she attempts to put form to her thoughts and feelings and visualise them on the canvas.