Amrita Dhillon (b. 1990, New Delhi, India) empowers a figurative interpretation of memory, distance, inheritance, and the images a family chooses to keep. The pictorial media adopted by the artist involve oil paint, watercolour and printmaking, worked from family photographs, historical archives, pop culture and film. Since nostalgia and estrangement are always inextricably linked to the photographed past, Dhillon’s artistic research revolves around the evocation of these fragments and how they echo in a life lived between continents.

Amrita Dhillon’s paintings are also not only material and medial shapeshifters, but function as verbatim gatekeepers of numerous realities: document merges with invention, New Delhi with Berlin, intimacy with distance, the remembered with the imagined. As alienation, longing and displacement are always inextricably linked with a life carried across borders, Dhillon’s practice arises from recollecting these stimuli and reworking them into narratives that withhold precisely as much as they disclose. Trained first as a historian at Bard College in New York before turning to painting at the Universität der Künste Berlin under Thilo Heinzmann, the artist treats the archive as something closer to a rumour than a record. Recipient of the Dorothea Konwiarz Scholarship and the Artists Inside Fellowship, and shown in Munich, Rome, Hamburg and extensively in Berlin, Dhillon unfolds figures caught mid-gesture in rooms whose stories have been deliberately mislaid. It thus takes no effort to imagine that these scenes carry on without us the moment we look away, keeping their secret exactly as long as someone is watching.