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Line as Witness: A Solo Exhibition by Yusuf at Black Cube Gallery, New Delhi
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- 20 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Sanya Malik's Black Cube Gallery and Shantanu Sharma present Line as Witness, a solo exhibition by Bhopal-based artist Yusuf, running from 29th March to 11th April 2026 at Sunder Nagar, New Delhi. The show brings together acrylic paintings, mixed media explorations and sculptural forms accumulated over decades of practice, and is open to all by prior appointment between 11am and 6pm.
Yusuf has spent his career treating the line not as a formal device but as the fundamental unit through which the world becomes visible. The line in his work is not decoration or outline: it measures space, records movement, constructs form and holds the memory of a gesture within it. It is the site where perception, abstraction and lived experience meet, and his practice has returned to it with a persistence and seriousness that defines the body of work on show here.
The paintings in Line as Witness operate through the tension between movement and stillness. Fields of lines establish atmospheric conditions across the surface, sometimes creating the sensation of energy passing through the composition like waves, at other moments forming a quiet stabilising grid. Within these fields, organic forms appear to hover, dissolve or crystallise. The references are ambiguous by design: shapes that suggest wind-shaped dunes, the structures of living tissue, or silhouettes drawn from memory without ever depicting any of these things directly. Yusuf is not a painter of nature but of its processes. Growth, erosion, sedimentation and the gradual unfolding of time are the actual subjects, translated into visual terms that resist literal reading. The result is what the exhibition describes as abstract realism, where the memory of natural phenomena persists even as the imagery holds itself back from direct representation.
The exhibition also includes mixed media works and sculptural forms that extend the line's role beyond the painted surface, giving the show a range that allows the depth of the practice to register across different material registers.
Yusuf was born in Gwalior in 1952 and obtained his diploma in both painting and sculpture from Gwalior in the 1970s. He is most associated with ink on rice paper, working with sparse and sometimes geometric forms spread across the surface, and his practice has been built quietly and consistently over fifty years. He has held 25 solo exhibitions and participated in significant group shows including the VII Triennale in New Delhi in 1992 and the Bangladesh Biennale in Dhaka in 1995, as well as shows in Korea and Japan. His awards include the Raza Award in 1984, the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award in 1987 and the National Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, New Delhi. He is perhaps best known institutionally for his foundational role in establishing the Graphic Workshop at Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, where he continues to work as Deputy Director of Graphics.
Line as Witness is a show that rewards sustained attention. Yusuf's work does not announce itself loudly, and the meaning, as the exhibition notes, resides in the spaces in between.
Line as Witness runs from 29th March to 11th April 2026 at Sunder Nagar, New Delhi. Entry is free. Visits are by prior appointment.
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