PAYAL AGARWAL

Artist Statement

I’m a contemporary figurative painter working in large-scale acrylics. I was born and live in India; my American studio is in Madison, Wisconsin. My work investigates psychological fragmentation, performativity, and urban isolation through baroque drama and expressionist intensity. I paint in layers: four to six translucent applications that mirror how we actually exist. Multiple contradictory states held in permanent tension. Never resolved. Only performed or suppressed.

The work holds multiple registers within a single subject: baroque elegance, expressionist dissolution, cosmic isolation. The same human, held in tension between performance and the world that erodes it. Sometimes performing elegance while surrounded by chaos. Other times dissolving entirely when defenses fail.

I’m interested in the human condition without protective mythology. The masks we perform so thoroughly we forget which one is real. The corruption woven into beauty from the beginning. The serpent already there, not invading Eden. The isolation of urban density, where millions of people create distance rather than connection.

Figures appear in baroque staging surrounded by demonic shadows. The demons aren’t attacking. They’re what we become continuous with when performance drops. The elegant red gown is a costume. The staged lighting makes the unease more disturbing, not less.

I work in acrylic on canvas, between 24 x 36 and 48 x 60 inches. Each painting is built slowly, each layer shifting what came before, so the painting only reveals itself near the end.

I hold a Master of Design from the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Delhi, where I ranked first nationally on the entrance examination. In 2026 The Gravity of Touch received Special Merit in Light Space & Time’s 16th Annual Figurative Exhibition and an Honorable Mention (Traditional) in Fusion Art’s Artist’s Choice 2026, selected from 351 international entries. My work was also selected for Gallerium’s Femina, Dynamix, and Spectrum 2026 international juried exhibitions. The Gravity of Touch and The Heat of Cold Distance were on view in She Holds These Truths at Arts for Vets in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and were invited back for the gallery’s April-June 2026 Featured Artist program.

Scale changes the relationship between the painting and the person in front of it. You cannot keep a comfortable distance. The work asks for proximity, and proximity asks something back.