Aparna Sarkar Solo Show

Aparna Sarkar, Tell me something I can touch, 2023, Oil on canvas, 72 × 96 in

Tell me something I can touch

Aparna Sarkar Solo Show
Curated by Tappeto Volante
Opening on September 21, 2023, from 6 PM to 9 PM
On view until October 29, 2023

Tappeto Volante is thrilled to announce Aparna Sarkar's debut solo exhibition, Tell me something I can touch,  from September 21 to October 29. Marking the beginning of the TV Project’s 3rd exhibition season, we are excited to feature Sarkar’s show as part of Gowanus Open Studios 2023.

Tell me something I can touch.
Text by Ashlyn Mooney

In the creases and folds of the fabrics here, we can read the remnants of touch. The smooth passage of a palm over silk; the grip of two fingertips on a raw, black-and-gold hem. Elsewhere, figures flit and dive, the motion of their forms creasing the paintings’ pattern-stitched planes. Alongside these brief, gestural moments, in the patterns and the colors–the floral criss-crosses of Tablecloth, the white-threaded cobalt, and red-orange in Kurthi–we see an index of other, longer histories. The centuries of Indian textile craft, of Kantha quilts and saris sewn with geometries of abstracted flora. The long afternoon of a Vermeer interior, a Turkish carpet bunched in the corner of the room. Years of moving a suitcase of saris from house to house. Hours in the studio, Aparna’s gaze lingering over each stitch in the golden bedspread.


Textile: the word echoes both texture and text, calls up sensual, tactile experience alongside written narrative. The echoes seem relevant here (tell me something I can touch) in paintings that weave together the organic, ephemeral forms of figures in motion and rumpled cloth with geometric patterns and their immanent craft histories. The figures blend and fade into the patterns that billow around them. The grid in these paintings is soft and malleable, like the warp and weft of cloth. We are all of us living within and between those modes of experience: the bodily and the historical, the sensory present and the inherited or remembered past. We live in and with those textures and texts. We fold them away, we carry them with us. We drape them, smooth them, shake them out.

Aparna Sarkar (b. 1992) is an Indian-American painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2021) and a BA in Mathematics from Pomona College (2014). Awards include selection for the 2022 Saatchi Art Rising Stars Report, a 2022 residency at the Jentel Foundation, inclusion in the 2019 editorial selection of Art Maze Magazine, and the 2018 Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Full Fellowship to attend Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Aparna has shown across the US, recently at spaces such as Peep Projects in Philadelphia, The Pit L.A., and 1969 Gallery in New York. This is her first solo show.