Self-Portraits

Keerthi returns to her own likeness again and again, and each canvas answers the question differently. The face is painted with unhurried photorealist precision - the fall of light on skin, the weight of a red scarf, the porcelain of a teacup held mid-gesture - while the world behind her is flattened into something closer to a poster: blocks of yellow, blue and pink, torn newsprint and packaging, the silhouettes of stray cats and insects drifting across the surface.

That tension is the point. A woman rendered as solidly as a photograph sits inside a space that refuses to behave like one. Dark sunglasses recur, turning the gaze back on the viewer; playing cards, flies and bees settle on the paint like small omens.