Siji Krishnan’s paintings invite viewers into a world where memory, myth, and daily life intertwine. Working primarily on delicate rice paper, she builds up translucent layers of watercolor and oil to reveal figures, landscapes, and hidden details. Her images often feel dreamlike—ponds shimmering with light, grasses bending in the rain, or figures dissolving into their surroundings—suggesting the ways that identity, home, and belonging are shaped by both what we see and what lies beneath the surface.
The exhibition The Secret Place brings together recent works from Krishnan’s Los Angeles debut, alongside five new large paintings created in her studio in Kerala, India. In these new works, Krishnan replaces her more figurative elements with water, plants, and sky. The natural world of her home—backwaters, monsoon rains, and village ponds—becomes a central motif, a site of both refuge and transformation. Themes of fertility and motherhood, community, and renewal flow through her practice, informed by her experiences of raising a child and the shifting boundaries between self and environment.
Krishnan’s art asks us to look slowly and closely. Small details emerge—an animal, a flower petal, a shadow of a figure—like secrets discovered over time. Both intimate and expansive, her paintings transcend cultural and geographic boundaries, embodying the Upanishadic (ancient Indian sacred philosophical texts) philosophy vasudhaiva kutumbakam: “the world is one family.”
