Priyanka Aelay's Painted Forests Come to KYNKYNY Mumbai

KYNKYNY Art Gallery, recently opened in an art deco building in Mumbai's Kala Ghoda, presents its next show this September, a solo exhibition by Priyanka Aelay titled "It Will Rain Again When We Meet," from 9th September to 1st October 2026 with free entry. The forest is the center of Aelay's world, and in these paintings it appears in a vast, lush expanse, its fauna half-hidden within the foliage, a fox in one corner, a tiger in another, and a jewel-bright bird peering out from multicolored leaves. The smallness and delicacy of these creatures against their surroundings is deliberate, building what the gallery describes as an atmosphere of abundance and growth, and Aelay works in fine layers of acrylic on linen to create landscapes that hold the real and the imagined together at once.

The current body of work grows out of Aelay's academic research in film studies and visual culture and extends her long interest in the folklore and myth that so often set their entire narratives inside the jungle. Tales she has studied, among them the widely dramatised Baalanagamma, tend to follow protagonists through trials in the wild, cut off from the calendar and dependent on the rhythms of nature to mark the passing of time. That reading shaped a series of large circular works that recall the cycles of the moon, a form the gallery notes carries that both has a feminine reference and a compositional purpose, breaking the usual top-to-bottom hierarchy of viewing and dissolving the neat separations between water, land, and air.

That dissolving is the quiet logic of her paintings. Aelay draws seamless relationships between the arboreal and the underwater so that ferns might read as corals and water as sky, a visual argument, in the gallery's framing, for the interconnection and coexistence of all living things. The animals, sometimes alone and sometimes in company, stand in for a human presence within a meditative space. Her palette and botanical detail draw openly on the miniature painting tradition she has always been drawn to, and she plays with the transparency and opacity of pigment to move a scene gently between light and dark, day and night, and waking and sleeping.

Aelay, who hails from Telangana, transforms the region's folk heritage into something distinctly contemporary, and her canvases deliberately abandon linear perspective, letting the landscapes float free of a fixed viewpoint. The gallery presents the work as an invitation to immerse oneself in a wilderness of a kind, as it puts it, sorely lacking in urban life, with the artist leaving clues and openings across the picture plane for the viewer's own interpretation.

The exhibition is curated within the wider program of KYNKYNY, founded in 2004 by Namu Kini and Vivek Radhakrishnan, a gallery that has worked with over 300 Indian artists across spaces in Bengaluru and Mumbai and returns often to questions of ecology, landscape, memory, and cultural inheritance.

"It Will Rain Again When We Meet" runs from 9th September to 1st October 2026 at KYNKYNY, 4th floor, 20 Gool Mansion, Homji Street, Kala Ghoda, Fort, Mumbai, open Monday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm, and closed on Sundays. 

More at KYNKYNY.