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‘Divine Manifestation’: Meena Sansanwal’s Inner Cosmology at Black Cube Gallery
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
At Black Cube Gallery, Divine Manifestation, a solo exhibition by Meena Sansanwal, unfolds less as a conventional presentation of artworks and more as an intimate mapping of an inner universe. Presented from 7 to 22 January 2026, the exhibition brings together paintings, paper mache sculptures, and mixed-media installations created over nearly a decade, offering a rare, sustained view into an artist’s evolving inner language.
Sansanwal, who studied painting at Delhi College of Art in the mid-1990s, has long worked from instinct rather than structure. Her practice is driven by what she describes as an innate, almost compulsive urge to paint, a need to translate internal states into form. Over the years, this instinct has matured into a visual cosmology where imagination, memory, and spirituality coexist. Her works emerge from what she calls a cathartic bridge between the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind, a space where images are first sculpted inwardly before finding physical form.
At the centre of this universe stands the female figure, not as a literal depiction of womanhood, but as Shakti and Prakriti, the primordial force from which all creation flows. Across Sansanwal’s work, the female body becomes landscape, sanctuary, and cosmic mandala, holding within it the five elements, the rhythms of nature, and the possibility of spiritual ascent. Bodies open into terrains, limbs become pathways, and apple trees grow from torsos, suggesting fertility not just of form, but of thought and consciousness.
Her engagement with the feminine extends into archetypal and mythic realms. Drawing from Jungian psychology as much as from global mythologies, Sansanwal explores recurring states of womanhood, the maiden, the mother, the sage, not as fixed identities, but as fluid, cyclical conditions. These figures evolve into polymorphic and biomorphic forms where woman, animal, and environment interpenetrate. Here, the feminine is never singular or linear; it is expansive, layered, and endlessly transforming.
Colour and pattern play a central role in articulating this inner terrain. Bright, saturated hues, intricate repetitions, and rhythmic symmetry echo her deep engagement with Indian folk traditions, popular illustration, and craft-based visual languages. Yet beneath the playfulness lies emotional depth. Her fantastical worlds feel familiar rather than escapist, rooted in cultural memory while remaining open to introspection. Nature and the universe recur as metaphors for energy, vibration, and flow, mirroring the organic movement of time and space.
Across Divine Manifestation, the works feel less like finished statements and more like moments of becoming. Sansanwal often speaks of entering a trance-like state while creating, where control dissolves and form flows through something larger than the self. This sense of surrender is visible in the fluidity of her compositions, their layered surfaces, and their luminous presence. The sacred and the surreal coexist without hierarchy, inviting viewers to slow down, to linger, and to encounter imagination as a site of spiritual inquiry.
Rather than offering answers, Divine Manifestation opens a portal into what the artist has described as the eternal garden of the mind, a space where dreamscapes, cultural symbols, and inner narratives converge. It is an exhibition that asks to be felt as much as seen, offering a quiet yet immersive meditation on the feminine as cosmos, and on art itself as a pathway toward inner awakening.
Exhibition: Divine Manifestation
Artist: Meena Sansanwal
Dates: 07 – 22 January 2026
Venue: Black Cube Gallery
Location: G12A, Hauz Khas, New Delhi
Timings: Tuesday to Saturday | 12:00 pm – 6:00 pm
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