Our Story
Neelam Gaur (b. 1983, Bhutan) is a contemporary visual artist and poet whose practice blends surreal figuration with the symbolic depth of Indian mythic imagination. Raised across multiple states and cities in India due to her father’s transferable profession, she grew up within diverse cultural environments that continue to shape her sensitive, layered visual language.
Formally trained with an MFA in Painting, she works at the threshold between the seen and the unseen — creating imagery that explores memory, identity, inner transformation, and the quiet spiritual forces that animate human experience.
Her paintings draw from the emotional and philosophical essence of Hindu thought and storytelling, yet move beyond literal depiction. Rather than illustrating traditional narratives, she reimagines their symbolic and psychological undercurrents — engaging themes of resilience, renewal, and the search for inner truth. Her figures often appear in dreamlike, atmospheric spaces where the boundaries of reality soften and the subconscious steps forward.
Her practice reflects a profound personal transformation following a burn injury in 2019, shaping her exploration of resilience, memory, and inner renewal. Through layered textures and an earthy palette of greens, ochres, and stone-based tones, her canvases evoke nature — grounding, sacred, and timeless. Each work becomes a quiet journey toward understanding, holding vulnerability and strength in balanced measure.
Her Hindi poetry collection, Pratiroop, expands these inquiries into the realm of language, mirroring the introspective and philosophical sensibilities that guide her visual work. She has participated in group exhibitions across India, offering pieces that invite viewers to enter their own inner landscapes.
Guided by curiosity and contemplation, Gaur sees art as a bridge — connecting the material and the intangible, the personal and the universal. Her practice continues to evolve, honouring mystery, memory, and meaning within the human experience.
She currently lives and works in Gurgaon, Haryana, India.
Artist's Statement
My practice is an inquiry into the fluid boundaries of the self. I work with hybrid forms - part human, part animal, part mythic, not as fantastical departures from reality, but as structures through which I examine the shifting nature of identity, memory, and healing. The accident of 2019 did not merely rupture my physical world; it reorganised my inner landscape. Painting became the method through which I reassembled that landscape, giving form to emotions that resisted ordinary language.
My visual vocabulary draws from Indic mythologies, particularly the archetype of the vāhana, beings that merge the corporeal and the divine. These hybrid guardians have always represented movement between worlds; in my work, they become metaphors for the psyche navigating the thresholds of trauma and transformation. They occupy states of becoming rather than completion.
Materially, I work with layered textures, allowing each surface to contain its own history of corrections, erasures, and reappearances. This process echoes my understanding of healing, non-linear, unpredictable, and shaped by sedimented experiences. Through colour, mark-making, and form, I explore the phenomenology of the internal: how emotion becomes image, how the invisible becomes tactile.
My aim is not to replicate myth but to rethink it. Mythology, to me, is a repository of psychological truths-narratives in which the human longing for protection, transcendence, and meaning takes symbolic form. By reimagining these symbols, I attempt to build a new speculative world, one in which the imagination is not an escape but an instrument of survival.
Ultimately, my work proposes that fantasy and reality are not opposites, but coexisting ontologies. I paint to make sense of this coexistence, to give the fractured self a terrain in which it can breathe, expand, and emerge anew.
Our Programs
Art Workshops
Fundamentals of Art
Art Courses
Advanced Art Techniques
Masterclasses
Professional Development
Art Retreats
Creative Nature Retreats
Material Memory
In Neelam Gaur’s work, the use of ink and oil on paper becomes a metaphor for the layered nature of inner life. Ink, fluid and irreversible, marks the immediacy of emotion, the moments that arrive without warning and leave a permanent trace. Oil, slow and reworkable, embodies reflection and the long process of understanding experience.
Their interaction on paper creates textures that function like visual memory: layered, partially concealed, and shaped by time. These surfaces mirror the philosophical core of her practice, that healing is nonlinear, identity is layered, and the self is formed through a continuous interplay of what is absorbed, what is transformed, and what remains visible.