PROGRESSIVE ARTISTS' GROUP

Some artists settle into a single medium and spend a lifetime refining it. Vikash Kalra took the harder road, moving fluidly between painting, drawing, and sculpture, letting each medium ask something different of him. This August, that full range comes together in one place, as Kalra presents a solo show at Artix 5.0, India's pioneering hotel art fair.

The Journey of Vikash Kalra

Kalra's practice did not arrive at its current breadth overnight. His work spans painted portrait heads, landscapes, and still life, alongside drawings and sketches that reveal his process in its rawest form, and experimental pieces that push past any single category. In recent years, that exploration has extended into sculpture, with pieces cast in bronze and fabricated in steel and fiber standing alongside his works on canvas and paper.

What ties it together is not a signature style so much as a signature sensibility, a willingness to let subject and material dictate form rather than forcing every idea through the same technique. A portrait head rendered in oil asks for a different hand than a figure welded in steel, and Kalra treats that difference as an opportunity rather than a constraint.

What's on Display

Paintings. Kalra's canvases move between color-driven emotion and quieter, more restrained studies, carrying the influence of Indian modernism while staying distinctly his own.

Portrait heads. Rather than pursuing likeness, Kalra's heads distill expression and identity into something closer to feeling than photograph, a thread that connects back to his long-standing interest in primitivism and simplicity.

Drawings and sketches. These works on paper offer a rare look at Kalra's process before it hardens into a finished painting or sculpture, line and tone doing the work that color and form will later take over.

Steel sculptures. Cold, industrial material bent toward organic, human forms, a deliberate tension that runs through this body of work.

Bronze sculptures. Cast and permanent, these pieces carry a weight, both literal and symbolic, that sets them apart from everything else in the show.

Why Artix

Artix has spent the past several editions redefining what an art fair can feel like, transforming hotel rooms into intimate, curated salons rather than the cavernous halls typical of conventional fairs. That format suits a show like Kalra's particularly well, letting paintings, drawings, and sculpture in three different materials sit together in a space that feels more like a considered private collection than a trade floor.

The fair was founded by Payal Kapoor, Malvika Poddar, and Sethu Vaidyanathan, three figures deeply rooted in the Indian art world. Kapoor has been promoting Indian contemporary and tribal art since 1993 through her gallery, Arushi Arts, and brings that same curatorial instinct to Artix. Together, the founders built the fair around a simple idea: that art is better experienced up close, in a setting that feels lived-in rather than sterile.

Backed by Artrise Art

Kalra's show carries the added weight of support from Artrise Art, an online bid-auction house, whose backing signals the kind of confidence that matters in a market increasingly crowded with new names.