Tanya Goel's architectural paintings index and map an archive of material collected from deconstructed houses, which were built in a modernist style prevalent in Delhi from the 1950's to 70's. After having lived in cities such as Chicago and New York, Goel returned to live in New Delhi, the city where she grew up - a city with an organic accrual of architecture and a unique "logic". She witnessed fundamental shifts in the use of industrial materials (steel and glass replacing iron and brick). Goel seeks to hold on tangibly to a rapidly disappearing period of modernity, and create a material record of a vanishing period. For these works, she makes her own pigments from a diverse range of materials including charcoal, aluminium, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite and foil, many sourced from those sites of architectural demolition. Goel has over the past three years experimented with drawing and painting on the surface of segments of extracted stone and concrete, developing an ongoing body of 'frescoes'. Her 'builder's drawings' on the other hand are residual of a process. They record permutation and convergence of ultramarine blue pigment, set against a finely drawn grid on the wall. 

Goel's newest works reference both weaving and the screen, mathematics and memory. "Like I'm weaving" Goel says, "I establish an algorithm, using different pigments as language, and repeat the code over and over until the algorithm starts to fall apart, and the pattern is unreadable". 


Born 1985 in New Delhi
MFA (Painting/Printmaking), Yale University School of Art, New Haven
PBS (Painting/Drawing), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Chicago
BFA (Painting/Drawing), Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda