The Artsy Encounter Begins
As autumn tiptoes into Delhi, the Visual Art Gallery at the India Habitat Centre transforms. It is no longer just walls and windows, it’s a forest, a riverbed, a nest for stories.
This time, it is welcoming Mishran. On October 1st, 2025, artists, critics, collectors, and passersby step into something rare: a world woven from clay, bronze, paint, and memory. Hovering at the heart of this world is Prenita Dutt, whose 18th solo exhibition, “Mishran: A Medley of Mediums,” becomes a passage through the living language of nature and art.
Each day, the gallery fills with people searching for something human, a feeling, a memory, or perhaps just the serenity that comes from standing among artworks born of genuine dialogue between artist and earth. For Prenita, this exhibition isn’t just a display. It’s a celebration, a meditation, and, above all, an invitation to journey together from the ephemeral to the everlasting.
Prenita Dutt: Artist, Listener, Storyteller
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Prenita’s practice began with exploring her small garden; fingertips caress rough bark, eyes move across the veins of a fallen leaf. Here, she listens for stories embodied and contained in seeds and stones. The many years spent in close company with adults with disabilities has grown and expanded her sense of the texture of patience, resilience, and transformation. Her artistic practice is a bridge between clay and canvas, oil and terracotta, bronze and stone, not for pageantry, but because each medium lets her hold a different truth to light.
Prenita’s self-taught roots as an artist, her first exhibition at the India Habitat Centre, in 2005, create for her the sound of freedom, curiosity, and openness to experimentation. Brush strokes are not only gestures but whispers; clay is not only formed but felt and understood, the memory of rain and sunlight, pressed into each curve.
Mishran Solo Exhibition Details
| Exhibition Details | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | Mishran: A Medley of Mediums |
| Artist | Prenita Dutt |
| Venue | Visual Art Gallery, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi |
| Dates | October 1 to 5, 2025 |
| Time | 10:00 am to 6:00 pm |
Nature’s Patterns: How Mishran Speaks
Across five days in the gallery, visitors find themselves pulled into nature’s rhythms. Watercolors drift gentle as morning mist. Oils sink deep, shimmering with memory. In ceramics, the muted reds and pomegranate shapes recall the earth itself, joyous, tactile, patient. Sculptures in fiberglass, bronze, and stone anchor fleeting thoughts, chiseling the intangible into permanence.
But the Mishran is not just a variety for its own sake. It’s an exploration of how seeds, branches, flowers, and stones, so seemingly simple, possess lives full of memory and meaning. Prenita’s art asks us: What do we carry within us, quietly growing, waiting for the sun? What have we endured, cracked by weather yet made more beautiful?
The Story Within: Prenita’s Voice, Nature’s Echo
Prenita often describes creation as a “conversation between self and universe.” In Mishran, visitors sense that dialogue everywhere. A clay seed, shaped over hours, emits an ancient whisper, reminding us that every sprouting is a remembering. A bronze branch twists, its surface alive with tool marks, echoing storms weathered, joys shared.
She tells those who gather in the gallery, “Nature is my constant. Whether on paper, canvas, clay, or stone, its shapes, textures, and rhythms guide my work.” Her art is not just about what endures; it’s about what heals. The cycles she portrays, seeds growing, flowers unfurling, branches reaching, mirror those of memory, loss, and renewal.
Mishran’s Meditative Invitation: A Visitor’s Journey
Many pause longest at the sculptures, fiberglass twisting like water, bronze glowing with the patina of patience, stone carved to reveal what has always lain inside. The dichotomy is everywhere, delicate watercolors beside sturdy ceramics; quick charcoal lines meeting slow, hand-built forms.
For some, the painted clouds evoke lost afternoons in childhood, or the simplicity of watching shadows move through leaves. For others, the ceramics and terracotta are a joyous celebration, each pomegranate glistening with possibility; each flower-shaped bowl an echo of longing or hope.
Five Senses, Five Days: Being Part of Mishran
When asked what Mishran offers, Prenita rarely describes objects alone. Instead, she talks about sensations, memories, encounters. Here’s what visitors experience, in bullet points:
- See: Shifting lights and colors as each artwork finds its mood throughout the day; organic shapes that evoke both the familiar and the mysterious.
- Touch: The cool density of stone, the soft grain of terracotta, the sleek curve of fiberglass, a reminder of earth and transformation.
- Smell: Earthy tones from ceramic pieces, the faint mineral tang of sculpture, perhaps a trace of flowers on a nearby installation.
- Hear: Silence punctuated by hushed conversations, footsteps echoing off stone floors, or the almost audible memory within each natural form.
- Feel: The weight of memory, both personal and universal; the comfort of resilience, the gentle nudge toward healing and hope.
Mishran Resonates Memory, Healing, and Hope
The exhibition invites reflection. Nature’s patterns, growth, loss, renewal, enduring beauty, run through every room. Prenita’s artistry is not neat or straightforward; instead, it is complex and accessible to deliberate interpretation. Each individual accesses something unique and personal, a once-forgotten moment from their childhood, a sense of calm, perhaps an aptitude for patience.
In a city moving forward, Mishran encourages its audience to stop, and observe what the world is capable of as it cycles through fragility and strength. Whether in the transient quality of watercolor, or the durability of bronze, the message is evident: transformation can be slow, beautiful, sometimes invisible, but nonetheless a result of us.
The Artist’s Story: From First Show to Mishran
Those who follow Prenita’s journey know her work grows more exploratory with each exhibition. A degree in psychology hints at her fascination with the inner worlds of others. Years spent facilitating creativity for adults with disabilities have taught her the texture of both patience and hope. Her illustrations, including for Ruskin Bond’s “While the Birds Still Sing”, display her capacity to offer tenderness and imagination in each format.
This current exhibition shown at the Visual Art Gallery represents a return, it represents a beginning, an artist’s unending conversation with nature, with memory, and with all who walk through her forest of mediums.
Exhibition Highlights
| Medium | Description | Themes |
|---|---|---|
| Paintings | Soft touch of watercolours, and also layered oil paint on canvas. | Memory, fragility, transience, and longing |
| Ceramics and Terracotta | Hand made and wheel thrown pieces showing inspiration from seeds, parrots, and pomegranates. | Patience, earthy feeling, touch, intimacy, and joy |
| Fiberglass Sculpture | Light yet enduring forms, drawing inspiration from organic patterns. | Endurance, continuity, and transformation |
| Bronze Sculpture | Timeless depictions of nature-inspired motifs. | Permanence, strength, and resilience |
| Stone Sculpture | Revealing hidden forms of solid stone using chisel, hammer, and imagination. | Timeless nature, strength, universality, and healing |
Takeaway
As dusk falls and the gallery empties each October evening, Mishran remains alive—not just in its artworks, but in the hearts of those who have walked among seeds, stones, and stories. Prenita Dutt’s multitude of mediums is not just an exhibit; it is an experience of being, listening, and being changed.
As the visitors leave they feel whole, they walk out of the space with a quiet knowledge that even in this fast paced modern world, art (and nature’s eternal spirit) can supply us with moments of grounding, healing, and hope.
