Anoushka Mirchandani: Everyone You Love Lives Here

MAY 27-JULY 31, 2026

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Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 27, 6- 8 PM

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce Everyone You Love Lives Here, an exhibition of new work by Anoushka Mirchandani, on view May 27–July 31, 2026, on the 10th floor. Bringing together new and recent paintings, the exhibition will trace Mirchandani’s development of new and ever-evolving formal strategies for exploring how identity exists in a constant state of flux and formation, of assembly and negotiation. Featuring works from three distinct yet interconnected and on-going series, Everyone You Love Lives Here will situate Mirchandani alongside significant works by Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman and Lisa Yuskavage, revealing that her work is part of a historical conversation around womanhood, memory, nature and ancestry.

In Mirchandani’s paintings, female figures exist in a liminal space between action and contemplation, between transition and becoming. Rendered with a complex interplay of solid color forms and loosely delineated contours of the body, her figures possess a porous relationship to the space around them, whether that be a domestic interior defined by intricate patterning and detail or an expanse of nature wild and abstract. The tension between her figure’s interior worlds and the composite quality of their construction expresses a type of subjectivity she understands through her own diasporic experience of being born and raised in Pune, India, before moving to the United States in early adulthood. Having learned how to balance the memory and influence of her upbringing with the expectations of a new society and culture, Mirchandani brings that same sense of discovery and experiment to her work, where a connection to the past is not only maintained, but continuously renewed through its contact with the present. Deeply biographical, Mirchandani’s work references her matrilineal history, which she accesses through a family archive of images, ephemera and an oral history of stories and memory.

Everyone You Love Lives Here is organized around three groupings of Mirchandani’s work: solitary female figures positioned in transitory spaces, interiors featuring couples and lone figures and selections from her Jungle Paintings series. In the abstract portraits, Mirchandani examines the idea of portraiture itself with female subjects that appear at the threshold separating one space or state of mind from another. Each painting shows a figure at a different state of attention, whether absorbed within or frankly addressing and returning the viewer’s gaze. Paired with one of Cindy Sherman’s Film Still images—a groundbreaking photographic series that examined identity and feminism in the context of mass media—these paintings provide a contemporary reflection on how one’s sense of self changes in response to what surrounds them.

In Mirchandani’s interior scenes featuring both couples and solitary figures, the architecture and objects that define domestic space become repositories of emotional connection and psychological tension. While each figure is constructed with a mix of forms both solid and spacious, the rooms they reside within are rendered with exacting detail and specificity, from a wicker chair to a carpet patterned with colorful diamonds, to the ornamentation embedded in the headboard above a mattress where a couple lay with arms intertwined. Placed in conversation with Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture Couple (2004), which shows two pink fabric figures joined together while suspended within a glass case, Mirchandani’s scenes reveal both intimacy and interiority as elaborate constructions.

With her Jungle Paintings,Mirchandani breaks free from the confines of architectural space, replacing the meticulously detailed interiors with lush green expanses of forest, field and water described with fluid and dynamic brushwork. In contrast to the tremulous dispositions of her interior subjects, these female figures invoke the ‘apsaras’ from South Asian mythology, mystical women born of mist and fog and known for their shape-shifting abilities. Here they coexist, merge and intertwine with landscapes real and imagined to create scenes that evoke a primordial site of belonging. Seen in tandem with Lisa Yuskavage’s painting Mutualism (2006), which depicts the joining of the female body with a fantastical vision of nature, Mirchandani’s Jungle Paintings express both wish and aspiration: they show the female body in a state of reciprocity with nature just as they envision identity being formed in concert with the world rather than in conflict with it.

About:

Anoushka Mirchandani (b. 1988, Pune, India) uses painting as a form of agency—an ongoing process of locating and relocating identity across shifting contexts. After emigrating from India to the United States at 18, she discovered new freedoms while confronting the complexities of belonging and loss. Over the past decade, she has cultivated a visual language that mirrors this interplay of concealment and revelation, expressing the layered nature of selfhood. Her paintings center on figures suspended between repose and action—often women posed with quiet confidence, unbothered by expectations of modesty or restraint. Their bodies dissolve into surrounding forms, delineated only by gestures of oil stick or pastel. The tension between bold poses and vanishing contours evokes questions of visibility and vulnerability: what parts of ourselves do we suppress, and what do we allow to emerge in unfamiliar spaces? Mirchandani’s debut institutional exhibition, My Body Was A River Once, is currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San José through August 23, 2026. She has presented solo exhibitions at Yossi Milo (New York, 2024); Galerie Isa (Mumbai, 2023); UTA Artist Space (Los Angeles, 2023); Rhodes Contemporary (London, 2021); and Glass Rice Gallery (San Francisco, 2020). Her film Landscapes of Longing screened at MoMA as part of New Directors/New Films (2025). Her work is held in the collections of the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), the Museum of Art and Photography (Bangalore), and Northwestern University (Chicago). She is currently Artist-in-Residence at Silver Art Projects (New York). In August of 2026 Mirchandani will be included in Never The Same River, curated by Dexter Wimberly, at the Ford Foundation, New York.

FLAG would like to acknowledge Anoushka Mirchandani, Nicolas Ochert, Yasser and Marian Mahmud, Suzanne McFayden, Priya Panjabi, the Raham Family, and private lenders for their generous loans of artworks to this exhibition.

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May 27-July 31, 2026