Tanya Goel was born in New Delhi in 1985 and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda
and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before completing her MFA at Yale University in 2010. Her
works are notable for their exploration of a rigorous abstraction that is deeply invested in the process of
their creation. The artist makes her own pigments from a diverse array of materials including charcoal,
aluminum, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite and foils, many sourced from sites of architectural
demolitions. She is interested in the textures of her pigments as well as their colors, which is a direct
result of how they reflect light. Her compositions, noted for their density and complexity, are mathematical
formulas which are established and then violated, resulting in a balance between structure and chaos.
Goel’s paintings can also be read as linguistic systems, as meaning is constructed only through laborious
repetition. Her works are in the collections of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, the Philadelphia
Museum in the USA, and the UBS bank in Zurich.