The Art of Balkrishna Doshi

Spotlighting the virtuosic building-inspired paintings of India’s most famous modern architect.

As the first Indian architect to win the Pritzker Prize, Balkrishna Doshi (1927-2023) was a pioneer of modern architecture in Asia. His modernist and brutalist designs were influenced by the work of his contemporaries Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, both of whom Doshi worked with directly in the 1950s. However, the renowned architect was also a celebrated postmodern artist. This monograph is the first of its kind to study Doshi’s contributions to painting. While his multicolored conceptual drawings for his building designs underscore his practical sensibilities, his paintings verge from the physical and mathematical constraints of architecture to create more abstract renderings of space. Executed in dark, muted colors, they incorporate silhouettes of shapes, people and buildings in various overlapping perspectives. In both of his practices, Doshi combines Western influence and Indian sensibilities, resulting in a cognitive universality that prioritizes experience and expression.