As The Universe, So The Soul: Rithika Merchant at Art Basel in Basel 2026

As the world falls apart in an epoch dominated by climate catastrophe, barbaric warfare and large-scale species extinction, Rithika Merchant’s magical landscapes propose a purposeful counterpoint to our bleak existential conditions. Sumptuously fecund in blossom and fruit, her paintings offer us living mountains with magnificent eyes, torrents of foliage and arabesques of creepers that might well be the neural networks of emergent worlds. Merchant’s works celebrate the unity of created beings, as articulated through the rituals of gathering and festivities of seasonal transition in which her protagonists participate.

These protagonists are composite, archetypal figures, their bodies clad in rippling leaves or flames. Some of them sport the heads of birds, reminding us of such ancient divinities as Horus and Garuda. They are guardians of the thresholds of consciousness: yogis and shamans who can grant us the gift of amplified insight and refined sensibility. And while Merchant’s paintings invoke the sacred and inviolate earth, they also bear witness to the predatory violence that is being visited on the earth through quarrying, fracking and mining. We find ourselves poised precariously between sanctuary and wasteland here.

Merchant draws on diverse symbolic systems while crafting her private mythology: the pantheon of Pharaonic Egypt is a prominent inspiration; there are references to Tantric imagery; glimpses of the Pahari Ramayana come through, as do scintillating traces of such exponents of mysterious illumination as Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington, manifested through such compelling motifs as the cosmic eye, the binocular portal between dimensions and the sun-boat, which recur throughout her oneiric oeuvre.

Merchant’s elegantly staged mise-en-scène, in which her figures and naturescapes find attunement with each other, is as painterly as it is choreographic. Perhaps its ultimate origins lie in the Renaissance pageants that have vanished from memory but continue to animate, for instance, the tableaux of Botticelli. These festivities recall us to the value of participatory ecstasy and a replenishing wholeness over the isolated anxiety, alienation and soul-depletion that are more routinely our lot in the age of late capital, rapid-fire consumption and the five-second attention economy.

Merchant’s oeuvre bears close affinities with the genres of science fiction, speculative fiction and utopian fantasy, in its emphasis on a continually unfolding process of world-building. Modulated through an adroit combination of planimetric and recessive techniques, her picture space is rich in spatial surprises. Her chosen palette of celadon, oxblood, turmeric, ecru, tangerine and indigo echoes the chromatic repertoire of the subcontinent’s tapestries and durries, as well as the pichhwai ceremonial backdrops associated with the devotional art of western India’s Pushti-marg community. Mythic constants and historical variables come together in Merchant’s fluid temporality; her phantasmagorical frames attest to an interplay between vigilance and trance. This art is not steeped in idyllic nostalgia. Rather, it gestures allegorically towards redemptive pathways into the future. Rithika Merchant’s key themes of cyclic renewal and planetary regeneration offer us the necessary antidote of hope at a particularly bleak moment in our collective experience.