With Moksha, Snowball Studios champions Paresh Maity’s search for the unseen

Celebrated artist Paresh Maity has often circled the same elemental preoccupations—light, form, and those borders where matter begins to slip into metaphor. Moksha, presented by Snowball Studios at Art Mumbai 2025, doesn’t so much answer these questions but rather exposes the ways in which Maity continues to wrestle with them. Installed at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse, the work positions itself as both a pivot and a provocation: an artist with five decades behind him returning, once again, to the problem of the “unseen”, but with a sharper clarity.

Tracing Maity’s trajectory has always meant watching a practice in motion. The standard narrative of his career—watercolours to sculpture, intimacy to monumentality—tends to flatten the more interesting truth: that Maity’s shifts in medium reflect a recurring discomfort with settling into any single visual language.

Born in 1965 in Tamluk near Kolkata, he has moved through more than 90 solo exhibitions across continents, with works inhabiting institutions as disparate as the British Museum, the Rubin Museum of Art, and the NGMA. But these milestones matter less as markers of success and more as reminders of how steadily his practice has expanded over the years.

His long-standing interest in light, often mistaken as a purely aesthetic choice, has always been central to this evolution. From the approximately 850-feet mural at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport—one of the longest in the world—to immersive installations such as Sound of Silence (crafted from 4,500 brass bells) and Genesis at Personal Structures 2024 during the Venice Biennale, Maity continually probed how material could become sensation, how experience could be shaped through luminosity and scale. 

Within this continuum, Moksha enters as a triumphant summation but as a point of rupture. Framed around the idea of liberation that runs through Indian spiritual traditions, the work meditates on impermanence and renewal, the eternal cycle through which form becomes energy, life, and its reflection.

The 15-foot form—fused from brass, copper, and steel—centres the tantric motif of the kapala, but Maity resists the easy trope of the skull as a meditation on mortality. Instead, he twists it into an unstable metaphor: a site where ego supposedly dissolves, yet where the weight of materiality remains insistently present.

The work’s surfaces intensify this contradiction. Polished brass gliding over darkened steel stages a tension between luminosity and density, transcendence and gravity. Rather than offering an unambiguous passage from form to formlessness, the sculpture holds the viewer in a space where meaning flickers but never fully settles. The skull becomes less a portal than a provocation—a reminder that the boundary between release and return is never as clean as spiritual narratives suggest.

Surrounding the sculpture, Maity deploys sound, light, smoke, and illusion to dissolve the perceptual frame. The environment, undeniably transportive, invited audiences to step into a space where form softened into energy, where the visible blurred into the intangible. 

With Moksha, Maity returned to the question that has quietly structured his entire practice: how creation itself might function as a form of liberation. The work unfolded as a meditation on the cycle of life—on the way every ending slips, almost imperceptibly, into another beginning, and how art can momentarily bridge the distance between the seen and the felt. And perhaps this is his latest artwork’s most revealing gesture: it laid bare an artist who remains—despite the scale of his ambitions, the weight of his legacy, the authority of five decades—restlessly, insistently in search.

All images: Snowball Studios

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