Viewing T. Venkanna: Sculpture Garden

Garden of earthly unease.

For his first institutional solo exhibition, T. Venkanna fills Studio Voltaire with a major new series of egg-tempera paintings on board. Born in Gajwel, India and based in Hyderabad, the artist has long used the body to examine power, desire, obedience and transgression. Sculpture Garden brings these concerns into a lush, unsettling world where the sacred and the corporeal blur into one another.

Venkanna hand-grinds coloured pigments and mixes them with egg yolk, building up fine layers that give the works their luminous surface. The technique connects him to a long history of religious painting, while the imagery draws on South Asian and European devotional traditions, reworking them with a distinctly original sensibility.

At the centre of the exhibition, Sculpture Garden (2026) spans the altar recess, an architectural reminder of the gallery’s former life as a chapel. Human forms and sculpted figures appear inside a dense landscape of sex and looking, with Adam and Eve watching from behind. Instead of a vision of paradise, the garden is a tense public arena where intimacy and display collide.

Elsewhere, Celebration (2026) folds darker political undertones into scenes of festivity, while Golden Quartet (2025) gilds bodily excess in gold leaf. Across the exhibition, desire is a force through which Venkanna examines national identity and social control. A challenging show, but definitely not one to miss.