THE BOMBAY FLORA CHRONICLE

With The Bombay Flora Chronicle, Deepak Shinde opens a new chapter — a body of recent works in a medium and scale the practice has never held before, made in Bombay at the edge of a forest, where the city and the wild have always shared a boundary.

The exhibition carries two firsts. It is the artist's first presentation of new work in twelve years. And it is his first solo exhibition at a private gallery: across five decades, Shinde chose to mount his solo shows in public institutions — spaces where a body of work stands before its audience with no name but the artist's own.

That the newest crossing should arrive with a first of this kind is fitting: the work is new, and so is the room.

The Bombay Flora Chronicle extends the inquiry into new territory — in medium, in scale, in ambition. At its heart is the question that has animated the practice for decades: coexistence, in every form it takes, as the oldest story we know.

A rhinoceros rides the Brahmaputra's floods; flamingos cross continents to nest in Mumbai's wetlands; Noah builds an ark so that every species may survive what no species caused; a devotee wades into sacred waters, held by a faith the crocodiles around her cannot touch. Mythology, ecology, memory, fantasy — different names here for the same instinct: the will to persist, together.

The medium enacts the inquiry: mixed-media works on layered, textured grounds, their surfaces catching and scattering light, at once material and apparitional. A surface that carries time.