Siri Devi Khandavilli

Siri Devi Khandavilli is an Indian artist originally from Bengaluru and now based out of New York, works across painting, performance, video and installation to create visual art rooted in traditional Indian techniques and yet transcends cultural specificity to hint at more significant commentaries about the nature of the present. She employs various methods, processes, and diverse approaches by co-opting the language of sculpture to painting, printmaking to sculpture, and so forth. 

She wants her Art to be timeless yet visual articulations of contemporary experience.

She is interested in global cultural migrations, the perception and history of the femme body in art, and how tradition transmutes across time and place. In her creative pursuits, she seeks to engage with an expansive range of influences, encompassing politics, literature, cinema, mythologies, and music. She is not confined to any particular medium, finding freedom in expressing her ideas through various channels as she deems fit. 

She believes her works of art and her processes are dynamic forces. capable of evolving and acquiring new energy, like a mirror that can reflect different angles and appearances. 

A leitmotif she employs in her works is the Rorschach-like Inkblots forms and mirrors, both as a medium as well as an idea.

She believes that these inkblots and mirrors allow viewers to explore and discover themselves. She hopes that her Art is a creative entity with flexibility, adaptability, and the ability to exist, witness, and be a part of its surroundings and transcend time and place.

Khandavilli hails from a family of accomplished artists, with her father being the renowned Kannada film director N. Lakshminarayan. She began attending art classes at the age of three at Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath and went on to study Mysore traditional painting under the tutelage of her aunt Susheela Devi. She has a Bachelors of Fine Arts and Masters of Fine Arts in Intermedia from Arizona State University, completed in 2003 and 2009 respectively. Siri completed a second Masters in Fine Arts in Sculpture from Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath in 2016. She has also been trained under the temple sculptor, Pandiyan from Kumbakonam. She works in various ateliers across the world including India to create her works in metal. Her extensive and broad education has shaped her into a visual artist who is at ease with various media and forms of artistic expression.

Currently she is engaged in creating her latest body of works, for India Art Fair ( 2024). Her recent group exhibitions with our gallery include, ‘MATRIX’: succinct ecosystems of through’ (2023); ‘Our Line in the Sand’ (2022) and ‘Beyond the Recurring Motif’ (2019) and India Art Fair (2020). Other recent exhibitions inclide ‘The Toilets, Geographies of Desire: (a) site and (b) situation’, Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Hebbar Foundation (2018); ‘Selfie Queen’, Lisa Sette Gallery, Arizona (2018) among others. Her works have been included in numerous group shows and have been collected around the world, including the Albertina Museum in 2020, Durham University Museum, UK in 2018, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, USA in 2016, Fidelity Art collection in 2016, & 2014, ASU Art Museum, USA in 2015, Queens Museum, USA in 2014; ESSL Museum, Austria in 2010;  Indigo Blue Art Gallery, Singapore in 2010 and Art Basel, Miami in 2013, 2014 and 2015.