Tandra 2025

Tandra by Abhishek Pandey

In his debut solo, Abhishek Pandey captures and chronicles the fleeting nature of his environment—the landscapes he has known, the historical sights he has seen, the cities he has inhabited, and the worlds he can only dream of. In his paintings of the present, he zooms in, engaging at street level with the built environment in the places he has known best. The artist spent his formative years in the spiritual cities of Benaras where he was born, and Sarnath where he was schooled. Both left an indelible mark on him, grounding his practice in a deep contemplation of his inner and outer world.

In his macro view of the past, he recalls an ecosystem of stasis, a time when nature and civilization existed in a more harmonious relationship. Yet as he casts his gaze forward into the future, his work offers a cautionary tale. He interrogates our ecological footprint and the consequences of unchecked, rapid development, which would disrupt the balance and drift us further into chaos.

Pandey thinks about both the visible and invisible forces that impact and surround us—from technological advancements to spirituality. His body of work presents an exercise in psychogeography—a method of mapping his own personal psychic and emotional responses to a place. These landscapes and cityscapes then function as metaphorical inscapes, reflecting his own internal experience. Through this process, the artist invites us to reconsider the ways we shape the world, and how it in turn influences us. 

Tandra, a Sanskrit word describes a liminal state of heightened consciousness experienced in meditation, between being asleep and being awake. As it is in meditation, repetition is a central characteristic in his practice. Devising his own sacred geometry in his work, concentric, abstracted lines appear repeatedly—in sculpture, drawing and painting—serving as a motif that reflects the passage of time, both linear and circular. 

Each line he creates is a meditation on our shared past, the present we live in, and the unknowable future. His artistic explorations mirror the architecture of the mind, always returning to the past or conjuring what is yet to come, unless brought into deliberate consciousness. Through endless landscapes, recursive patterns, and representations of eternal cycles, the artist invites us to contemplate the interconnectedness of all things, and to confront an uncertain world where harmony and equilibrium is always as possible as it is at risk.