On October 26, Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, India, launched The Art of Balkrishna Doshi (published December 2023) at the Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad, focusing on the artistic oeuvre of the renowned Indian architect. The art gallery held the book launch in collaboration with the Vastu Shilpa Foundation, for which B.V. Doshi laid the seeds in 1978. The book was also on view during the exhibition Blueprints of Illusions: Balkrishna Doshi, which ran from October 15, 2024 – November 12, 2024, at Vadehra Art Gallery. The Art of Balkrishna Doshi brings together a large body of Doshi's work and is published by Vadehra Art Gallery and König Books in Cologne, Germany. It is a significant publication that introduces Doshi’s parallel practice as an artist to many who only know him as a modernist architect. The book is edited by Roshini Vadehra, the co-director of Vadehra Art Gallery and Khushnu Panthaki Hoof, who is an architect, exhibition designer and curator - and Doshi’s granddaughter. Hoof also serves as the director of the Vastu Shilpa Foundation. The Art of Balkrishna Doshi leads with a foreword by Roshini and Arun Vadehra, followed by an essay by Hoof, sharing insights from her final conversation with her grandfather. It also features an interview with Doshi, conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director at Serpentine Galleries in London.

...Do you allow a chance to play the game, or do you determine the chance? And I think the beauty is in allowing it to happen. If the hand moves, the depths inside your body are also moving. Your psyche is also telling you to go somewhere and then the image happens. So the intellect and the psyche go together.
– B.V. Doshi, architect and artist

In her essay "The sun, the trees, the monkeys and the peacocks", Hoof remembers asking Doshi about the most important life lesson. Doshi replied, “Fiction. Fiction is the most important thing to remember - since it twists and turns, constantly evolves, changes, adapts and, most importantly, expresses fluidity of time.” He continues, “It’s free. It has no beginning and no end. Life is a delicate dance of fiction and reality, entwined with the ethereal threads of illusion.” As Hoof points out, this is a compelling lens through which to read Doshi’s work. In his sketches and paintings, he played with perspective to effortlessly blend reality and imagination, often leaving the viewer unable to determine where one ended and the other began. Doshi had a tendency to combine the floor plans or interiors of dwellings with human figures or layer portrayals of multiple dwellings on top of one another, such that elements appeared to morph into each other.

In the sketch Untitled (2018), Doshi draws a cross-section of a dwelling and plays with perspective to depict three or four human characters. It is unclear who they are, and their relationship, yet their countenances suggest they are wearing masks like those seen in Kathakali dance performances. Going Within (2014) sits on the page opposite Untitled in the book, depicting a cityscape within a person’s face, suggesting an interesting reversal of perspectives between the two sketches.

Works from the painting series Remnants of Memories (2021) are filled with walls, windows, staircases, doors and landscapes that intermingle – leaving one without a definite entry or exit point to many of these paintings. Doshi’s work is dreamlike – as though his sketches and paintings are developed partly from his memories and imagination. This is consistent with Hoof’s reading of the works. In the past, she has written of them, “The dark hues of colour and composition in his paintings draw from his memory of his grandfather’s ancestral home where he spent his early years—green walls, dark spaces, narrow staircases and old patinas of leftover paint. The bright colours in his works draw from impressions of textiles hanging in the sun, flowing in the breeze as they partially overlap with each other and create a melange of colours.” She also mentions that these works are inspired by the memories of the various Indian architecture projects that Doshi has worked on. Studying his buildings alongside his drawings may lead one to see parallels between the Aranya low-cost housing project in Indore, Madhya Pradesh and the works in this series.

Doshi fully embraced a stream-of-consciousness process in his artmaking. In his interview with Obrist, he mentioned that he would begin with a single line and allow its form to inspire what came after. There has always been an element of chance to his artistry, which he acknowledged, saying, “It’s a question of: Do you allow a chance to play the game, or do you determine the chance? And I think the beauty is in allowing it to happen. If the hand moves, the depths inside your body are also moving. Your psyche is also telling you to go somewhere and then the image happens. So the intellect and the psyche go together.” The Art of Balkrishna Doshi treats readers to a rich body of imaginative and playful work that speaks volumes about his mind, even with the book’s sparse use of text.

‘The Art of Balkrishna Doshi’ was published on December 7, 2023, by Vadehra Art Gallery and König Books. ‘Blueprints of Illusions: Balkrishna Doshi’ ran from October 15 – November 12 at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi.