NS Harsha: Camel and the tent times

5 Jun-31 Jul 2026

Overview

Victoria Miro is delighted to present an exhibition of new paintings by renowned Indian artist NS Harsha.

NS Harsha draws on a broad spectrum of Indian painting traditions and popular arts, as well as the western canon, to create quietly philosophical works that reflect on the structures, orders and systems that define us. Central to his work is a gentle questioning of our place within the known and unknown worlds, the strength of our grip on the tangible and, conversely, the force with which the intangible exerts a hold over us. Harsha’s work entwines strands of personal biography with shared narratives and broader socio-political scenarios that are often concerned with the politics of labour and our quest for greater meaning.

The works on view elaborate on the artist’s celebrated, ongoing ‘lamp grid’ series. The paintings all feature diyas – lamps traditionally made from clay that are lit during rituals, prayers, ceremonies and celebrations – with flames and trails of smoke together creating patterns that guide the eye around each canvas: rising as a column (Workers having a break); ascending the legs of a table (Camel and the tent times); dancing shoal-like (Journey through water marks);  or delineating a series of fluid brush strokes (Harvest as a water mark). 

The emerging narratives pivot between aspects of work and rest, the small yet heroic figure of the worker appearing in agricultural or industrial scenarios that springboard into larger philosophical questions. Workers having a break takes inspiration from the well-known 1932 photograph Lunch atop a Skyscraper, depicting ironworkers sitting on a beam of the RCA Building during the construction of the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. Harsha’s diverse workforce takes its break held aloft by trails from a central column of lamps that extend into a nocturnal sky, suggesting a more mysterious interlude or escape into the nightly realm of dreams. The composition is echoed in the fiery A chandelier of our time, which the artist describes as ‘a chandelier studded with eternal human labour’.

Workers in ostensibly rural settings, such as in Harvest as a water mark, inspired by a visit to a paddy field, find themselves in the company of suited middlemen counting money, or birds feeding on insects and cows grazing, indicative of other ecosystems. This theme is picked up in Again, and again, and again where stooped rice field workers and ascending flames are counterpoints in a composition of rhythmic insistence.

Often the paintings explore the interplay between a static, harmonising structure – in essence, a grid or succession of diyas, figures and other motifs, depicted in a shallow space on backgrounds of a single, strong colour – and fleeting natural forces. Harsha describes his intent to capture a momentary event passing through a collective framework, much like a gentle breeze causing flames to twist, turn and flicker in their struggle to remain alight. He finds beauty in the dynamic tension between stability and flux, especially when viewed as part of a wider consideration of the structures of knowledge, belief and power, and the potential of an invisible force to reshape and drive change.

Press

NS Harsha: Camel and the tent times press release
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