The impact of the stone industry is unmissable (to the point of a certain gratuitousness) in Kishangarh. As you enter the small town in Rajasthan, your attention will invariably settle on the numerous billboard hoardings for various marble manufacturers dotting the Jaipur-Ajmer highway—all promising something along the lines of finesse etched in stone—and their hulking refineries somewhere in the distance, alongside hundreds of marble warehouses, wholesale stores and sheds selling sculptures and statues, all a stone’s throw from each other. The city is responsible for producing around 90 per cent of all the marble in India, on account of its proximity to large marble quarries and an abundance of skilled labour. With a thriving industry and means to process and distribute the stones produced, Kishangarh is considered to be a key marble hub for dealers, distributors and suppliers from all over the world. Hence, it transpires that an event celebrating the artistry and timeless materiality of stone could only take place in this naturally manufactured landscape. The StoneX refinery in Kishangarh recently launched a coffee table book dedicated to their art residency, Art Soirée. The book celebrates “the extraordinary artists who [have] transformed raw stone into iconic works of contemporary [art],” as noted in the press release.

The volume presents the sculptural works of 10 artists who participated in Art Soiree last year in 2024. These included sculptors familiar with stone and some who were experimenting with it for the first time, including Shanthamani Muddaiah, Sudarshan Shetty, Gigi Scaria, Shaik Azghar Ali, Harsha Durugadda, R. Magesh, Yogesh Ramkrishna, Teja Gavankar, Chandrashekar Koteshwar and Harmeet Rattan. In the book, moody black and white photographs that attempt to capture the subtle tactility of the Indian artists’ fruitful labour are put into dialogue with virtuoso artists who have become renowned for their mastery of stonecraft, such as Japanese artist Kota Kinutani or Nicolas Bertoux. Through their programming, oriented towards building a cultural discourse, StoneX hopes to underscore the lineage that intrinsically ties the materiality of stone to artistic genesis.

Established in 2003, StoneX offers over 700 varieties of marble, granite, onyx, limestone and semi-precious stones, sourced globally and processed on their own premises. The brand considers stone to be a naturally produced art form, hewn by the Earth. As Sushant Pathak, group CMO at StoneX Global, revealed at the book launch, the brand plans on unveiling a design district sometime in the next year, dedicated to stone. Pathak notes in an official release for the photo book, “The journey of creating art with these 10 masters has been truly transformational. Each encounter was more than a conversation—it was a doorway into the soul of the artist and the silent wisdom of stone…Each work proved that stone can embody fragility, strength, irony and timeless wonder.”

The sculptures by the Art Soiree residents, which were unveiled earlier this year, are exceptionally pluralistic in how they handle and transform an otherwise rigid material. Meant to be put on permanent display in the StoneX Museum (as part of the design district), they are currently strewn throughout the refinery. Juxtaposed with the monolithic slabs of stone that have themselves been procured from quarries all over the world, the finished forms set against the raw blocks propose a fertile dialogue. The deep, gritty veins in Chennai-based visual artist Magesh R’s The Monarch (2024), which is shaped like a horse’s head, could perhaps only be achieved with the use of Grigio Bronze Amani marble. Its dark colour palette lends itself easily to Relic, in which Magesh hoped to invoke the image of a fallen warrior horse, employing a prominent motif from his artistic practice. Or perhaps the smoothness of Durugadda’s The Way of the Wind (2024), meant to emulate the fluidity of air, would look completely different if not rendered in Pantheon marble. The sculptor, who often works with sinuous forms, turns the solid material liquid through his manipulations. It’s an age-old question: is the work of art only conceived in the mind, or is it conceived through an active engagement with the material world? As the exhibiting artists all emphasise in a panel discussion with Prachi Bhattacharya, CEO of Stonex Art, the answer lies somewhere in between for them.

For someone like Muddaiah, the dialogue with a different variation of the same Pantheon marble Durugadda used resulted in Bloom, which mimics the supple folds of textile. The different striations in the stone appear as small wrinkles and the terracotta palette adds a sense of texture. On the other hand, the solidness of Thassos Novelato marble gives way to the airiness of clouds in Rattan’s Dream House. Inspired by the cityscape and his own hometown, the sculpture incorporates architectural elements and geometric forms to signify a process of transformation. Scaria, for his contribution, blends two shades of Cappadocia marble for his impossible Stairway, similarly resorting to the architectural form of intertwining staircases to depict the labyrinthine thought processes of artists. The possibilities are as endless as the kinds of stone that can be mined.

Designed by Urbanscape Architects, the refinery itself is unlike the more utilitarian buildings surrounding it. With a facade that reuses stone scraps that would otherwise go to waste and an undulating form, the industrial architecture is proof that the people housed in it see stone as art and life. This most natural form, in its afterlife, also gives the city of Kishangarh its own version of ‘Switzerland’. Snowy white plateaus and icy blue pools of water in the Kishangarh marble dumpyard—from an accumulation of waste slurry deposited by the surrounding industries—have become a tourist attraction, lingering in the imagination long after the event has ended.