Padma Karmakar

Born in 1993 in New Delhi and currently based in Vadodara, Gujarat, Padma Karmakar is a contemporary printmaker whose practice offers a compelling meditation on the fractured realities of urban life. Working at the intersection of observation, memory, and socio political inquiry, her oeuvre examines the psychological and environmental conditions produced by the modern metropolis, particularly within the shifting landscapes of New Delhi.

Deeply informed by the experience of navigating the city through its public transport systems, her works emerge from sustained encounters with the crowded, chaotic, and often invisible margins of urban existence. These spaces marked by congestion, alienation, precarity, and resilience become the visual and conceptual ground of her practice. Through layered compositions, she reflects on the tensions between cosmopolitan aspiration and the neglected undercurrents of the city, revealing a parallel urban mindscape shaped by vulnerability, displacement, and disconnection from nature. The anxieties of lockdown and the pandemic further intensified these concerns, sharpening her focus on isolation, fear, and the fragile emotional ecology of contemporary living.

Printmaking forms the core of her artistic language, valued for both its meditative rigor and its capacity for variation, repetition, and transformation. Initially working extensively with zinc plate etching, she has increasingly embraced woodcut to create larger, more distilled compositions that retain both tactile immediacy and formal strength. Her visual vocabulary often juxtaposes crowds, solitary presences, and fleeting episodes of city life, constructing images that oscillate between documentation and psychological reflection.

A recipient of several significant honours including the 5th National Tagore Exhibition of Painting Award, the Manorama Young Printmaker Award, the Birla Academy of Art and Culture Award for Printmaking, the 91st AIFACS Award, and the Lalit Kala Akademi Scholarship (2021–22)—her work has been exhibited widely across India and internationally, including in the United States, Bangladesh, and Japan.