Biography
In her work, Nalini Malani uses female mythological icons both Indian (eg. Radha, Sita) and Western (eg. Medea, Cassandra), or fictional characters such as Alice from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, to explore her own history as well as the feminine condition of yesterday and today.
In 2007, chosen by Robert Storr for the 52nd Venice Biennale, Malani created a series of “reverse paintings” using a traditional technique of painting the underside of glass. In the same year, the IMMA in Dublin dedicated to her a retrospective, showing her paintings, drawings, videos and projections. In 2017, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam exhibited her work. Two major retrospectives of Malani’s oeuvre were held in 2018 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin.
Winner of the Joan Miró Prize in 2019, Nalini Malani had an exhibition at Fundación Joan Miró in Barcelona the following year. In 2022, she was awarded a fellowship at the National Gallery in London, which led to an exhibition, “My Reality is Different”, in the same institution. In 2023, she received the Kyoto Prize, an outstanding distinction dubbed the Nobel Prize in Japan.
The MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery and the MNAM – Centre Pompidou have recently acquired key works by Nalini Malani.
