Artist Joya Mukerjee Logue grew up in the American midwest, though her life in Ohio was punctuated by occasional visits to an ancestral home in a busy marketplace in the city of Ambala, Haryana, in northern India. Her forefathers migrated from Behala in what is now suburban Kolkata to Ambala nearly two centuries ago, in 1845, to help build a cantonment town for India’s colonial rulers. Generations of grandparents and great-aunts continued to make the rambling house a home for Mukerjee Logue on occasional summer visits. In those who walk before me, a solo exhibition at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, she works between memory and imagination to record her impressions of home, family and the city in a series of oil and watercolour paintings.

The warm and earthy tones seen across Mukerjee Logue’s work are drawn from how she remembers Ambala, awash in a diffused haze of sunlight and dust, her eyes drawn to muted tones and faded colours. In Procession (2024), we see four women in white saris captured mid-stride. Painted from the perspective of a child looking up at taller adults, their faces are not in the frame; instead, one distinguishes between them by observing the minute differences in how they drape their saris, some showing a generous section of midriff, while others wrap the end of the sari around their shoulders, sheathing their torsos from view. In Procession, as in other works, Mukerjee Logue applies several layers of paint to the frame to compose a final image. Initial washes of oxide red and burnt umber show up under wispy and thinning layers of white fabric, lending a full-bodiedness to the composition. Mukerjee Logue occasionally sketches into a diary, mixing colours to define a colour palette for her works and to choreograph possible scenes.

For Mukerjee Logue, a personal history of the city is drawn from collective memory, including conversations with her 82-year-old father, an amateur documentarian who constantly recorded glimpses of his daily life. At the Vadehra show, he makes an appearance as a young boy with an avid interest in gardening, in a work based on memory and narrative.

In another set of three works, Mukerjee Logue relinquishes her human protagonists to focus on the structure of the house, over multiple generations, drawing on oral accounts of how various grandparents and great-grandparents added to the house as the family grew. Time, alongside memory, can be an ambiguous presence in her work. She rarely paints from photographs; one exception is a rendering of the Royal Medical Hall in Ambala – in general, the artist likes to think of the scenes she paints as atemporal. The people in these scenes are strangers, though they draw on jumbled memories of faces, dispositions and quirks.

Time, alongside memory, can be an ambiguous presence in her work.

Women dominate the frame in the selection of works in the exhibition, with one departure—Conversations(2024)—a portrait of three men and an older woman, seated on an assemblage of vintage chairs. An incongruous palm tree, again a species not native to north India, which Mukerjee Logue remembers from childhood visits, looms large in the otherwise plain background.

Our Shared Sari is a series of four watercolours on brown paper which extracts these women from their surroundings. Here, Mukerjee Logue uses the sari as a container for its wearers, painting outlines and creases in shades of white to define them on the page. She layers coats of colour to add texture to the image, with solid chunks of white and trailing lines of watery white. In Our Shared Sari 04, a black-haired woman slouches with her back to the viewer, wrapping an arm around her knee as she looks into the distance. The sari-wearing women in Mukerjee Logue’s paintings make for an unlikely presence in Ambala, which lies 200 kilometres north of New Delhi – the most common attire for women in the area is a salwar kameez, a two-piece ensemble.

Mukerjee Logue has had previous exhibitions in the United States and London, including shows at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, in 2019 and at Cromwell Place Gallery in 2023. those who walk before me is her first solo show in India.

‘those who walk before me’ is on view at Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi until September 17, 2024.