How can I come back

New Delhi-based artist Sheila Makhijani has spent over four decades exploring the expansive possibilities of abstraction through painting and drawing. Trained in New Delhi and Japan, she has developed a distinctive practice on paper. Her compositions investigate the line as an organic form and vector of energy—fluid, curving, and alive. Inked, drawn, and painted, these lines accumulate into densely layered, overlapping forms that appear to float above their ground, activating intimate yet cosmic spaces. Makhijani’s restless hand-drawn marks quiver with lyrical movement and quiet tension. As the artist notes, "[My lines] realize that maybe it is better to be a little tame and a little wild."[1] In How can I come back, coral-hued shapes gather within two black linear forms that loosely brace their restless proliferation.

[1] The artist quoted in Cornelia H. Butler and Catherine de Zegher, On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century, Exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010, p. 113.