After Holi: Celebration, Residue, and Pop Color Rituals
Medium: Mixed Media on Wood
Size: 4ft x 4ft
Creation Date: 2025
Collection: Pop Art
“After Holi' balances chaos and clarity, each stroke a step through abstraction’s wild terrain.”
After Holi (2025) is part of my Pop Art Collection, created as a reflection on the aftermath of exuberance. Inspired by the vibrant energy of the Holi festival — where color becomes both celebration and catharsis — this 48 x 48 inch acrylic on canvas captures the lingering traces of joy, chaos, and collective release.
The composition bursts with neon pinks, electric blues, and vibrant oranges, arranged in flat, graphic fields that collide and overlap like leftover splashes on a wall or the streets the day after Holi. But After Holi is not a depiction of the festival itself — it's an exploration of what remains when the euphoria fades, when color becomes residue, when memory takes on a synthetic glow.
In this dialogue, the work resonates with Jeff Koons, whose shiny surfaces and saturated palettes both celebrate and critique consumer culture’s obsession with spectacle and surface. Like Koons, I use visual seduction — hyper-color, gloss, and playfulness — to invite reflection on the hollowness that often follows the spectacle.
Yet where Koons leans into polished perfection, After Holi embraces the mess, the imperfections, the stains that refuse to be scrubbed clean. It is a painting that revels in the tension between joy and exhaustion, between collective rituals and solitary reflections.
As part of my Pop Art Collection, After Holi is both a love letter to color and a subtle critique of how quickly we package, consume, and discard moments of intensity.
