After twelve years, Deepak Shinde presents new work. The Bombay Flora Chronicle, curated by Sumesh Sharma and presented at Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai, opens on 13 August 2026 and remains on view through 3 September 2026.
The exhibition carries two firsts. It is Shinde’s first presentation of new work in twelve years. And it is his first solo exhibition at a private gallery, a meaningful distinction for an artist who, across six decades and over two dozen solo presentations, consistently chose public institutions: spaces where work stands before its audience without intermediary. That this newest body of work arrives through a different kind of room speaks not to a change in conviction, but to its deepening.
Born in 1946 in Yavatmal, Maharashtra, into a landlord family with its roots from a nomadic pastoral community whose rhythms of movement, land, and coexistence with the natural world shaped his earliest perceptions, Shinde trained at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai. Those roots in a landscape where the human and the animal were not separate categories have never left the work. Over six decades, that foundational sensibility has expressed itself through successive and distinct bodies of work: abstraction in the 1970s, socio-political urban figuration in the 1980s, a contemplative figurative turn in the 1990s, and for the past two decades a sustained engagement with animal allegory as the primary language for questions that have always preoccupied him of coexistence, ecological conscience, and what humanity owes the living world it shares.
The Bombay Flora Chronicle extends that inquiry into new territory in medium, in scale, and in the fullness of its ambition. At its heart is a question that has quietly animated Shinde’s practice for decades: not simply how we share the world with other living things, but how coexistence, in every form it takes, is the oldest and most persistent story we know. The rhinoceros navigates the Brahmaputra’s annual floods; the flamingo crosses continents to nest in Mumbai’s wetlands before returning from where it came; Noah builds an ark so that every species may survive what no species caused. Across faiths, across millennia, across the boundary between the known and the unknowable, the gesture is the same life reaching toward life, survival seeking sanctuary, one world encountering another. Even Shinde’s cosmological works, in which visitors from distant worlds land on Earth and meet a bird before a human, belong to this same unfolding: the first act of contact is not conquest but encounter. And then there is the devotee who wades into sacred waters, oblivious to the crocodiles around her, held entirely by faith her coexistence with danger made possible only by something she cannot prove but will not abandon. In The Bombay Flora Chronicle, mythology, ecology, memory, and fantasy are not separate territories. They are different names for the same instinct: the will to persist, together, in a world that asks everything of us.
The medium enacts the inquiry. All new mixed-media works built on layered, textured grounds with surfaces that catch and scatter light the pieces render their subjects at once material and apparitional, anchored in the specific yet luminous with the mythic. It is a surface that carries time.
Speaking about the new work, Deepak Shinde said: “Everything that has mattered to me or inspires my fantasy the animals, the rivers, the sacred, the forgotten, are all lives at the edge of what we allow ourselves to see. These works are an attempt to stand at that edge and look without turning away. The medium I found for this work holds that quality: nothing is fixed, everything is still arriving.”
The Bombay Flora Chronicle is the newest crossing in a practice that has never stood still.
Exhibition Details
- Exhibition: The Bombay Flora Chronicle
- Artist: Deepak Shinde
- Curator: Sumesh Sharma
- Venue: Gallery Art & Soul, Mumbai
- Dates: 13 August – 3 September 2026
- Gallery Timings: 11am – 7pm
- Preview: 13 August; 5 – 9pm
About Deepak Shinde
Born 2 October 1946 in Yavatmal, Maharashtra, Deepak Shinde is a 1982 alumnus of Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he has mounted over two dozen solo exhibitions across India and internationally and participated in over fifty group shows. He has been invited to the Tokyo Biennale, Havana Biennale, VII Triennale India, and the Fifth Beijing Biennale, and has served as Commissioner for the 10th Triennale India. In 2016, he received the Career Achievement Award by the Directorate of Art, Maharashtra State. His works are in institutional and private collections in India and internationally.
