Aabha Paul, Artist, Latest Extra Quality ⚡

The response to Paul’s latest work has been strong. wrote in The Caravan (March 2025): “Aabha Paul has finally stopped painting pictures, and started painting the act of looking itself. Her latest canvases are not windows onto a world; they are cracked screens—and through those cracks, a strange, new tenderness emerges.” Some critics from the more traditionalist school have found the work “disorienting” or “deliberately broken,” but Paul welcomes the critique, noting that disorientation is the precise emotional register of contemporary life.

Paul’s studio practice has become increasingly hybrid. While she still works extensively with traditional mediums (oil sticks, graphite, and Indian handmade paper), her recent process begins with a “digital sketchbook”—hundreds of screenshots, screen-recorded glitches, and zoomed-in fragments of her own earlier paintings. She projects these distorted digital images onto raw canvas and then “corrects” or “mis-translates” them by hand. This results in a unique surface tension: areas of precise, almost photorealistic detail (e.g., a hand, a teacup) sit next to violent, expressionist scrapes where the digital source code seems to have bled through. aabha paul, artist, latest

Paul’s most recent body of work, exhibited in a solo show at (New Delhi, early 2025) and a concurrent digital release through the Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa, late 2024), marks a decisive evolution. Moving away from the overtly figurative narratives of her earlier “Holding Space” series (2021-2022), her latest works embrace a fractured, palimpsestic quality. The response to Paul’s latest work has been strong

Titled , this series responds directly to the post-pandemic condition—where video calls, archived smartphone images, and AI-generated memories have blurred the line between lived experience and simulated recall. Paul’s studio practice has become increasingly hybrid

Aabha Paul (b. 1989, New Delhi) is a contemporary visual artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, digital collage, and installation. Known for a distinct visual language that oscillates between the tactile and the pixelated, Paul interrogates the nature of memory, the construction of feminine identity, and the haunting presence of technology in everyday intimacy. Her work has gained significant critical attention for its raw, vulnerable, yet fiercely controlled aesthetic—a space where childhood nostalgia collides with the unsettling gloss of the digital age.