From studying biology and preparing for medical entrance exams in Ghaziabad to finding his feet at the Slade, the artist creates paintings as rooted in people, places and fleeting moments that have shaped his sense of home.
Before Lakshya Bhargava knew he wanted to be a painter, he knew he liked hiding in the art room. Growing up in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, he did not have much exposure to galleries or museums, encountering contemporary art properly for the first time at around 18. Instead, his visual education came largely through cartoons – Hindi, English and Japanese animation that he watched constantly. At school, whenever an art competition or annual function rolled around, he would disappear into the art room to paint backdrops and make props. “It was honestly one of the most relaxing places for me to be,” he says.
Art, however, did not initially seem like a realistic career. Lakshya studied biology and prepared for medical entrance exams including NEET and AIIMS, following a path that felt expected of him even though he enjoyed the subject. Eventually, he decided to study art instead, moving to Bengaluru to attend the Bengaluru School of Visual Arts, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath.
After graduating in 2022 and taking part in the Students’ Biennale at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, alongside residencies and further work, he moved to London in 2024 to study painting at the Slade. “Moving to London changed my relationship with painting,” he says. “I had been questioning whether painting was enough on its own. I felt a real pressure to make the work more conceptual, more intellectual and more overtly political in order for it to have value. I also felt pressure to speak about the work in a very intellectual way, even when that wasn’t how I actually experienced making it. I kept trying to think like I imagined other artists thought, rather than trusting the way I naturally approached painting.”
After a pivotal visit to the 2024 Turner Prize exhibition, moving through the research-heavy rooms, he came across Claudette Johnson’s work and started crying. “It wasn’t because of one particular painting,” he explains. “It was the fact that she had simply painted and drawn. That was the language she had chosen, and she trusted it completely.” Something clicked, and since then Lakshya has become more comfortable trusting the medium itself, describing his approach as trying to understand things “through my eyes and my hand rather than beginning with an idea in my head”.
That subject is usually close to home, meaning that his friends and the rooms he spends time in become protagonists to his work – all drawn from experiences he has lived. “I’m less interested in what somebody looks like than in what it feels like to know them,” he explains.
Most paintings begin with a photograph he’s taken – “I need it to be my view of that moment” – and he might return to an image five or six months later and discover that it means something completely different. Memory and observation are key drivers of his practice, while quick drawings can become another way of starting off a piece when he’s been immediately inspired. From there, he thinks about the crop, scale and composition, sometimes balancing an image according to the rule of thirds or golden ratio, and other times deliberately throwing that balance off.
The resulting paintings have an almost suspended quality, where figures are caught mid-gesture or partly cropped from view, while rooms, food, clothing and fragments of bodies become equally integral to the story. Across the works pictured here, warm orange light gives these scenes a particular softness, whether someone is sitting with a friend or standing at a doorway. Lakshya creates that light himself from his imagination and then with the colour mixing. “The colour changes with it,” he says. “That helps me decide what needs more attention, what can disappear a little and where I want somebody’s eye to move.” His acrylic paintings are built from thin, watery layers influenced by Bengal wash, echoing the softened pigment of his watercolours.
Two recent paintings, Once it Felt Like Home and Xiaorui at the Door, show how personal his process has become. The first began during Lakshya’s first nights in a new London room, when he couldn’t sleep and started making small watercolours of a street lamp falling across the wall beside his bed. Four months later, when he finally made the larger painting, the room had accumulated new memories, including a night when two friends stayed over – he placed one of those original watercolours inside the finished canvas, allowing two versions of the same space to exist together.
Xiaorui at the Door, meanwhile, started around Christmas or New Year when Xiaorui was at his house. By the time he painted it, the relationship had changed after an argument. As the figure appears to leave, Lakshya deliberately left part of his show unfinished. “In my head it somehow meant that he couldn’t completely walk away yet,” he says. He also added a drawing that he made when they first met. “So suddenly the painting held different points in our relationship – the beginning, the moment I was painting and everything that had happened in between.”
There is no grand instruction attached to these paintings; rather, Lakshya hopes people might simply “slow down a little” and allow themselves to see some parallels. “I think a lot of the moments I paint are very small and ordinary, but they exist in everyone’s life in some way. Maybe the work gives someone a chance to recognise something from their own life, or to look at something familiar with a little more attention.”
