Latika Katt’s final works celebrate nature and transience at Delhi’s Gallery Threshold

“I wanted visitors to feel they had met her, had known her. To feel the hands that chiselled these rocks, to hear her voice, and to leave with an experience that stays with them for a long time.”That’s how Tunty Chauhan of Gallery Threshold describes its latest show, Abandoned — an exhibition of sculptor Latika Katt’s final body of work. After walking through the show, it is difficult to disagree with Chauhan.There is a stillness that fills the gallery. It is not the silence of an empty room but the kind that compels you to slow down. You pause a little longer before each work, carefully look at the impressions on the stone, and begin to imagine the artist’s hands at work. A film on the artist by Muzaffar Ali playing on loop in the gallery makes one even more curious. Ali shot this film at the India International Centre, Lodhi Road, and had planned to shoot Latika in Banaras, but she passed away before that. Latika Katt, ABANDONED 7, Bronze and Stone | Photo Credit: threshold gallery Latika, who passed away in 2025, spent a lifetime carving stone, casting bronze, and pushing boundaries with the medium of sculpture. Abandoned showcases the works Latika made during the last few years of her life, alongside a few intimate graphite drawings that reveal a side of the artist few people knew.Bronze forms, first cast in wax, have been embedded into blocks of stone. The works look almost like fragments unearthed from an archaeological excavation, part relic, part architecture, and part memory. The forms invite you to wonder what existed before. “Created towards the end of her life, these works carry a quiet sense of finality and reflection. Bronze forms, cast from wax models and set within stone, come together in unexpected harmony,” explains Tunty, who has also curated the show.The sculptures are grounded in ideas that occupied Latika throughout her career. Nature was always her greatest teacher. Latika lived and worked in Banaras. She was fascinated by erosion, growth, weathering and decay.Latika once said, “My sculptures are all about assimilation of my feelings and reactions to what is happening around me and what touches my heart and mind. Nature is my inspiration; therefore, my works are spontaneously created and organic in feel!” Her graphite drawings capture light falling on water, tree branches, and shifting landscapes. “Her drawings reveal the quieter side of her practice. Through studies of light, water, trees, and landscapes, they offer a glimpse into where her ideas first took shape,” remarks Tunty. Tunty says that Latika’s drawings were intensely personal. “Her drawings were made in the solitude of a closed studio. They reveal the gentler side of this fiercely independent woman.”Born in Varanasi in 1948, Latika belonged to a generation when very few women chose sculpture as a profession. She became an eminent sculptor, working across stone, marble, bronze, terracotta, paper, and even cow dung. She studied the human body and observed corpses to better understand the living face, and still much of her later work veered towards abstraction, influenced by natural processes and the landscape of Varanasi.Abandoned is a very poignant show that hints at the transient nature of life. It helps understand that behind the monumental sculptures was someone who also found joy in watching light on water or the curve of a tree branch.Abandoned is on view at Gallery Threshold, C-221, Sarvodya Enclave, Delhi, till September 12 Published - September 04, 2026 04:08 pm IST