Tathi Premchand is a Mumbai-based contemporary Indian artist whose practice moves across painting, drawing, digital media, photography, video, installation, and experimental forms of image-making. Born in 1969, he studied Applied Art at the Government School of Art, Aurangabad. His academic training introduced him to drawing, design, visual communication, and the technical construction of images, while his subsequent studio practice developed beyond the conventional boundaries of applied and fine art.
Premchand has lived and worked in Mumbai since the early 1990s. The city—with its congested streets, suburban trains, rapid movement, architectural contrasts, public advertisements, and dense circulation of people and images—has remained an important source of observation. However, his works are not straightforward documentary records of urban life. He transforms visual fragments from the city into symbolic, satirical, and psychologically charged compositions.
His paintings frequently bring together human figures, animals, objects, text, diagrams, mechanical structures, and references to popular culture. These elements may appear familiar individually, but their unusual combinations create uncertainty and invite several interpretations. The resulting compositions often examine contemporary identity, nationalism, social conformity, consumer culture, technological change, and the contradictions of public life.
Works such as India Is My Country, All Indians Are… and Partaking Cosmos demonstrate Premchand’s interest in combining recognisable imagery with open-ended social and philosophical enquiry. The unfinished or disrupted statement in India Is My Country, All Indians Are… draws attention to the distance that may exist between civic ideals and lived social reality. His images do not offer simple political messages; instead, they encourage the viewer to question familiar symbols and inherited assumptions. Aakriti Art Gallery’s collection records paintings by the artist in oil and acrylic from the early and mid-2000s.
Drawing and Experimental Practice
Drawing occupies a central position in Premchand’s practice. His drawing books function as visual laboratories in which ideas, observations, symbols, and spontaneous associations are recorded and developed. They reveal an energetic process of thinking through images rather than simply preparing studies for finished paintings.
These drawings frequently possess the immediacy of cartoons, visual notes, or private diagrams. Figures and objects may be distorted, repeated, or placed within shifting narrative sequences. The sketchbook therefore becomes an independent artistic space where humour, anxiety, memory, and social observation coexist. Recent critical writing has described these drawing books as carrying the restless visual energy of Mumbai and reflecting the artist’s sustained observation of its people and movements.
Premchand’s engagement with digital imagery and video extends this enquiry into new media. Rather than treating technology only as a production tool, he investigates how digital systems alter perception, communication, memory, and the circulation of images. His practice consequently moves between handmade marks and technologically produced visual material.
Exhibitions and Recognition
Premchand’s early achievements included a gold medal in clay modelling in 1988, first prize in drawing and sketching in 1989, and first prize at an annual exhibition in 1990.
His solo exhibitions include Pomegranate at Kalakriti Fine Art Gallery, Mumbai, in 2005, followed by The Indian Mathematical Ruler–1 in 2006 and The Indian Mathematical Ruler–2 in 2007 at Art Circle Studio, Dadar, Mumbai. His work was also presented through online exhibitions organised by Saffronart between 2006 and 2009. In 2007, a work was included in the BNHS Greenscape–2 auction, associated with Pheroza Godrej.
These projects demonstrate the breadth of his practice, which has developed through conventional exhibitions as well as alternative, digital, and interdisciplinary platforms.
Association with Aakriti Art Gallery
Aakriti Art Gallery represents a focused selection of Tathi Premchand’s paintings. The gallery’s current records include works such as India Is My Country, All Indians Are…, Partaking Cosmos, and Imitation, executed in oil and acrylic during the early and mid-2000s.
His inclusion in Aakriti’s collection reflects the gallery’s engagement with artists whose practices extend beyond conventional painting into conceptual, digital, and experimental forms of contemporary art.
Tathi Premchand’s significance lies in his ability to treat the image as a field of continuous enquiry. Through painting, drawing, text, photography, and new media, he examines how individuals interpret an increasingly crowded and mediated world. His work combines observation with satire, visual complexity with spontaneity, and social commentary with an openness that resists fixed conclusions.
