Biography
Born in 1946 in Karachi, Nalini Malani lives and works in Bombay. With the help of female icons from mythology, both Indian (Radha, Sita) and Western (Medea, Cassandra), or fictional characters such as Alice from Lewis Carroll, she explores her personal history and the feminine condition of yesterday and today. In 2007, she was chosen by Robert Storr for the 52nd Venice Biennale and created a series of ‘reverse paintings,’ a technique inspired by the tradition of painting the underside of glass. That same summer, the IMMA in Dublin dedicated a retrospective show and catalogue to the artist, including paintings, drawings, videos and projections. Her work has also been exhibited at the Kiran Nadar Foundation in New Delhi and at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2017). Two major retrospectives have been organised in 2018, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Castello di Rivoli in Turin. The MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate Gallery and the MNAM-Centre Pompidou have recently acquired key works by Nalini Malani. Winner of the Joan Miró prize in 2019, she had an exhbition at Fundación Joan Miró in Barcelona the following year. In 2022 Nalini Malani was awarded a fellowship at the National Gallery in London which lead to an exhibition there « My Reality is different » and in 2023 she received the Kyoto prize, an oustanding distinction often referred to as the equivalent of Nobel prize in Asia.
