Sukoon’ (The Illustrated Silence) is a solo exhibition by Jaipur based artist, Monika Sharda to open on 16th January 2026 at the Main Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi.

'Sukoon’ (The Illustrated Silence) is a solo exhibition by Jaipur based artist, Monika Sharda to open on 16th January 2026 at the Main Gallery, Bikaner House, New Delhi. Curated by JohnyML, this exhibition will be formally inaugurated by Shri. Harshvardhan Sharma, Head of Art Projects, New Delhi Municipal Corporation, in the presence of many other dignitaries. The show will be on view till 20th January 2026.

Sukoon, the blissful calmness, cannot come from the awareness of history alone. As far as our generic understanding goes, history, instead of giving peace, is supposed to raise a lot of questions about the way we have lived on the face of the earth and also about the ideologies which have driven us to our destinations. However, these conflicts are overlooked when people find their solace in life-affirming mythologies where the collective cultural unconscious, at its various registers keep quick fixers for problems and instant relief for pains through moralistic narratives, mediated through the grand verbal architectures created around the God heads. MoniKa, as much as she looks at history, she also invests her painterly time in excavating the subconscious layers of human understanding about mythology and stories. With that aim in mind, she has explored the prime voice heard at the beginning of the universe; if OM is for us, an abstract word is for others who have different religious sensibilities. The folk and tribal cultures all over the world have their kinds of origin stories where the primal voice takes the center stage in the narratives. MoniKa has explored all those in her paintings.

“I started doing this series a few years ago as I have been visiting different countries and trying to understand the visual representation of their spiritual cultures. I could find a strong resonance with the expressions of the traditional art forms, including the folk and tribal art of these countries than the contemporary art production, and was enamored by their charming ways of articulation. It was a triggering point for me to explore the mythical traditions of India. In this series, I treat time as layers and narratives as submerging and erupting forms,” says MoniKa Sharda.

“MoniKa Sharda’s works represent the meditative aspects of art making. Right from the Oriental landscape paintings to the Tibetan Tankha paintings, the images and vistas are created not merely for painterly pleasure, instead, they are created as a part of their effort to find the core and the harmony of things. They are frozen narratives. Unlike the western modern and contemporary art, MoniKa’s works have a meditative content in them; they are process based with layers of paints and narrative symbolism built up within and without these layers to capture the contemplative painterly effects,” says JohnyML, the art historian and curator of this exhibition.