We are delighted to announce All of Civilisation on a Leaf, the first solo exhibition for Mannat Gandotra at Luce Gallery. A series of large-scale vibrant paintings will be on view beginning November 28th running through January 12th. Gandotra is a London-based painter who creates lyrical abstract paintings with a bold color palette, visible brushstrokes, and distinctive lines, all formed through spontaneous gestures. Her work is diaristic, visualizing her personal experiences and perceptive observations, imbuing a spectrum of sentiments onto the canvas. When viewed together, the paintings in All of Civilisation on a Leaf, seek to explore the complexity and intensity of our emotions by enveloping viewers in a seductive dissonance of form and pigment.

The exhibition's title, All of Civilisation on a Leaf, is borrowed from a painting she created earlier in her career that felt deeply relevant to this body of work. For Gandotra, this phrase served as a prompt, inspiring robust visual compositions that encapsulate the vastness and intricacies of our human existence, condensed and distilled until it finds a perch on a humble leaf, or in this case, within the confines of the canvas.

Growing like wild gardens, Gandotra’s forms flourish in chaos, with colors vying for attention, and lines dancing to silent tunes. Her works seem to capture moments of pure opposition, yielding equal parts creation and destruction, condensing and expanding. In her search for inspiration, she is drawn to unconventional details or elements out of place, such as a flowing river disrupted by protruding rocks or smooth wood grains interrupted by gnarly knots. Her objective is always to look beyond the symmetry and precision of traditional beauty, instead aiming to emulate and emphasize the imperfect imperfections in our world. To achieve this, she paints intuitively, allowing the fluidity of brushstrokes and pools of color to guide her toward compositions, forming a collaborative effort between creation and creator. In the studio, she often works on these paintings in groups simultaneously —like those on view here — giving them shared characteristics akin to siblings sharing the same womb.

In Asking for a Stampede (2023), garish pink, cobalt, and neon-orange shapes swirl in a sea of pale chartreuse and algae-green forms. The composition pulls towards and away from each side and corner, offering no clear orientation, granting freedom to the viewer for exploration in any direction. As the eye traverses the canvas, darker areas of saturated teal draw you deeper below the surface, encouraging contemplation. Meanwhile, brighter patches of lime green energize and excite, lifting your gaze to the shallow surface, and evoking a sense of anticipation. In this piece, echoes of Wassily Kandinsky's musicality and the pure expressionism forms of artists like Lee Krasner are evident.

Overall, this painting embodies a tension between light and dark, diaphanous and opaque, perhaps hinting at one element waiting for its moment to swiftly eclipse the other, as the title alludes. Yet, as with all of the artist’s titles, they are not meant to be narrative or conceptual. Rather she likens them to how we name children, where an individual’s name serves to identify them, rather than be used to define or express their entire story.

The strength of Gandotra’s work lies in how she communicates a genuine spontaneity by skillfully manipulating forms, line weight, and opposing colors, to guide the viewer towards feeling rare and powerful emotions reminiscent of fleeting joyful laughter or a fluttering heart in love.

Mannat Gandotra (b. 2001, New Dehli, India) is a London-based painter working in lyrical abstraction. A discerning observer, she draws inspiration from facets of her daily life and experience as a young British-Indian woman in search of the unconventional to create paintings that are lively, emotive, and saturated with color. Gandotra graduated with a BFA in 2023 from the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in London. She has exhibited in the United Kingdom and the United States, and she’s currently a student of the Royal College of Art in London.

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