India, June 14 -- There is a quiet ache in being unseen, a feeling Aashima Mehrotra tackles head on in Vanchana Ek Vritaant, currently running at New Delhi's India Habitat Centre. Society often ignores its true talents, leaving gifted creators with zero stage left to stand on and forcing a silence on masters of their craft. Mehrotra channels this exact sense of cultural and personal loss, but refuses to let the narrative end in despair.

Working with encaustic painting is stubbornly difficult. Heating beeswax and pigment requires intense patience, yet she handles it beautifully, sealing raw emotion into thick, tactile layers. Her central figure is a woman carrying the heavy weight of social exclusion. But rather than breaking under the pr...