Mequitta Ahuja

Tiwani Contemporary now represents Mequitta Ahuja and is pleased to present Notations, her first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Mequitta Ahuja’s recent works explores the currency of the figure of the artist at work in the history of European and American figurative painting. Merging the roles of artist and subject, her monumental paintings depict the artist engrossed in various stages of her artistic process, often within the clearly defined architectural space of the studio. Ahuja’s self-portraits explore multiple modes of representation, including abstraction, text, naturalism, schematic description, graphic flatness, and illusion. Working across these modalities of representation allows the artist to visually catalogue painting conventions while putting those conventions towards her own representational needs and to ask timely questions about the power dynamics underpinning image production and art history: who does the representing, who is represented and in what manner?

Mequitta Ahuja (b.1976, Grand Rapids, Michigan) lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Recent exhibitions include Champagne Life at the Saatchi Gallery, London, (2016); State of the Art at Crystal Bridges, AK (2014); Marks of Genius at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, MN (2014); Portraiture Now at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, DC (2013) and The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2012). She is a recipient of several awards including a 2009 Joan Mitchell Award and a 2011 Tiffany award.