Shambhavi (born 1966) is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist currently based in New Delhi, India. Her artistic practice includes a wide variety of processes and media, but her work is largely non-figurative and focuses on the relationship between man and nature, as well as the social and metaphysical condition of the agricultural worker.
Born in Patna, she grew up spending a lot of time with her grandparents in the countryside – visits that she cites as the origin of her fascination with nature and the inspiration for much of her work.
She attended the College of Fine Arts and Crafts, Patna in the 1980s.
She moved to New Delhi in 1990, earning a Master’s in Fine Arts from Delhi College of Art and she has continued to live and work in the capital for the majority of her Three-decade career, despite frequent travel.
In the 1997, Shambhavi travelled to the Netherlands as the youngest artist of the foundation for Indian Artists, Amsterdam to participate in a project at the Tropen museum in Amsterdam, it was here that she began to take interest in issues of migration and migrant labor.
In 2000-2001, she was an artist-in-residence at Greatmore Studios, in Cape Town, South Africa, which led not only to a deepened engagement with the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi, but also to an invitation to participate in Holland South Africa Line (HSAL), an international exchange project with Dutch artists held in the William Fehr Collection, in the Castle of Good Hope.
In 2010, She was invited to be an artist-in-residence at STPI – Creative Workshop & Gallery, in Singapore.
Despite her extensive international travel, Shambhavi continues to ground her work in her upbringing in Bihar, which she said “nurtured and evolved [her] creative language.” Her experiences abroad, in fact, helped to clarify her existing interest in the relationship between nature and man – it was while traveling, for example, that she began to become aware of the history of migration, as well as the plight of migrant laborers. Although Shambhavi, who has worked in paint, printmaking, sculpture, video installation, and other new media, uses largely non-figurative narrative modes of expression, her work remains closely engaged with the life and struggles of the agricultural worker.
Her work has been exhibited as solo shows as well as selected group shows in India, Singapore, Austria (Vienna & Salzburg), South Africa (Durban & Cape town), Australia (Melbourne & Brisbane), New York, and The Netherlands, where she was associated with the Foundation of Indian Artists, Amsterdam from 1991-2000.
Her work was recently added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in New York.
The most recent showcase of her work is at the on going Kochi Muzhiris Biennale 2018.