A painter who trusts what colour does.

Rushit Shah was born on 8 September 1986 in Vadodara, Gujarat. He lives and works between India, Singapore, and Germany, and divides the studio year between the three. He is colourblind, and treats this not as a limitation but as the origin of his method: unable to rely on the names of colours, he learned to read what a colour weighs against its neighbour. The paintings are records of those small, almost physical decisions — built in successive layers of oil, lacquer, drip, scraped pigment, and dispersed mineral on linen and canvas, then argued with until something refuses to give way.

Two inheritances meet in the work and do not resolve. The first is the visual world he grew up inside — the ornament, the miniature, the devotional surface that crowds every available inch with image. The second is the international vocabulary of abstraction he later entered as an adult. He does not want to choose. The friction between those two languages is, so far, the thing he has most to say.

He cites Jung's idea that what cannot be said directly is said in image, and Krishnamurti's insistence that clear seeing requires the destruction of what one already thinks one knows, as the two thoughts that organise his studio days. He works slowly, in long accumulated sessions, and considers a painting finished only when the negotiation feels settled enough to be worth a name.

The current body of work is grouped into three rooms — Memory of Salt, Tideline, and Lampblack Nights — and is presented as an archive made between three studios by someone who travelled too much to settle on one, and who paints as a way of staying in the conversation.