In San José, Anoushka Mirchandani Turns the Body Into a River

Mirchandani was born in 1988 in Pune, India, and is now based in San Francisco, where she works as both a painter and filmmaker. Her paintings return again and again to themes of displacement, matrilineage, and what she has described as an "inherited scarcity of space.” Rather than illustrating that inheritance literally, she renders it atmospherically: figures merge with waterfalls, silks, and sculpted wooden forms in what curators have called "fluid metamorphoses that blur the boundaries between body and land."

Mirchandani's path to San José has been built one show at a time: Jonathan Carver Moore in San Francisco (2025), Yossi Milo in New York (2024), and Galerie Isa in Mumbai (2023), among other international stops. She's also a Silver Art Projects resident, a program that places emerging artists in studio space at 4 World Trade Center in New York. Her 2024 film *Landscapes of Longing* screened as part of MoMA's New Directors/New Films series, a rare crossover for a painter still early in an institutional career.

Her work has already found its way into public collections, including the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Art and Photography in Bangalore, and Northwestern University. These kinds of institutional acquisitions tend to arrive much later in an artist's career, if at all.

What makes Mirchandani distinct from the wave of figurative painters currently dominating gallery programming is her refusal to let the figure stay solid. Her subjects are always on the verge of becoming something else — water, plant, memory — which gives the work a specificity that resists easy categorization as either "identity painting" or straightforward mythological revival. It's a body of work about inheritance that never explains itself too plainly, and that restraint is part of what curators and collectors are responding to.