Rithika Merchant
Artist of the Month
Rithika Merchant is a visual artist from Mumbai, India. Her work delves into comparative mythology, science, and speculative fiction, featuring creatures and symbolism that are part of her personal visual vocabulary. She creates art that connects our collective past with possible new worlds we may inhabit.
Merchant’s art is characterized by its detailed and layered storytelling. She draws inspiration from various mythologies, including Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Aztec, as well as shamanic and animist cults, Buddhist rites, and 15th-century European cartography. Her technique involves creating parameters by folding the paper, which she describes as “the bones of the painting,” and then building the composition with pencil, ink, watercolor, and gouache.
One of her notable series, “Aerial Women” (2019–21), focuses on Peri, winged, fairy-like Persian spirits who are kept caged and denied access to paradise for their devious behavior. Merchant’s depiction shows these spirits liberated and dancing through an imagined cosmos2.
Merchant’s recent works, such as “Festival of the Phoenix Sun,” propose a “solar syncretism” that brings together various mythological and spiritual references to create a new cosmology for our collective future
Merchant has exhibited her work internationally, including solo exhibitions like “Terraformation” in London (2023) and “Festival of the Phoenix Sun” in Paris (2022). She has also been recognized with several awards, such as the Artsy Vanguard 2022 and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize 2021.
If you’re interested in exploring her work further, you can visit her official website: Rithika Merchant
