Seema Kohli’s First Solo Exhibition in the United States: Samsara & Metamorphosis: The Mystical World of Seema Kohli

Seema Kohli is one of India’s most distinguished contemporary artists, with a practice that spans painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and performance. For more than four decades, her work has brought together memory, mythology, spirituality, and lived experience, creating immersive environments that invite reflection and contemplation.

Kohli’s work has been featured in major international exhibitions and museums, including a solo exhibition at the Museum of Sacred Art in Belgium in 2019 and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016. Her work is held in institutional collections such as the British Museum (UK), Rubin Museum (USA), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (US), among others.

Kohli is also a sought-after speaker and has been invited to present at organizations and institutions including TEDx, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Davis, among others.

A collection of recent paintings by the artist will be on display and available for sale.

For over four decades, Kohli has developed a distinctive body of work rooted in India’s ancient spiritual and mythological traditions, while remaining deeply connected to the concerns of the present. Rather than treating myth as a relic of the past, Kohli approaches it as a living, evolving language—one that brings together personal memory and lived experience to explore ideas of time, identity, and transformation. Her immersive visual worlds invite reflection and inner inquiry, offering viewers a space where ancient wisdom and contemporary life meet.

Kohli’s work is inspired by the generative forces of nature—its cycles of growth, dissolution, and renewal. In Indian philosophy, this creative energy is closely associated with the feminine principle, the source of life and regeneration celebrated across mythic and spiritual traditions. Kohli draws from this lineage, using the womb as a potent symbol of creation and possibility as she explores the eternal cycles of birth and death. Her artworks give form to invisible energies, presenting the sacred feminine as a powerful force that moves through imagination, consciousness, and being.

Central to Kohli’s visual language is Shakti, the transformative power of the divine feminine, often expressed through Yogini iconography. These figures emerge not as passive symbols but as empowered, multifaceted presences—embodying agency, resilience, and becoming. Her layered compositions chart inward journeys from chaos to clarity, fragmentation to wholeness, rendering psychic and spiritual transformation tangible.

Kohli’s practice weaves together diverse philosophical traditions, from Tantric symbolism and Samkhya dualism, to the introspective wisdom of Sufism and the emotive devotion of Bhakti poetry. These influences inform her exploration of the body as a sacred vessel and a site of inner knowledge. Her use of 24-karat gold and silver leaf, textiles, metal, and recycled yarn evoke ritual, care, and reverence within material form.

Through what she describes as a process of “re-mythologizing” modern life, Kohli offers a powerful counterpoint to a fragmented world—reanimating the sacred feminine as a source of imagination, healing, and freedom, where the ancient and contemporary exist in luminous harmony.

For more information about these events, to schedule a private viewing, or to inquire about available works, please contact Sonia Patwardhan, director and founder of Laasya Art at info@laasyaart.com or call +1 650-770-9088.