Multi-Disciplinary
The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham
Atul is one of 9 artists selected for a one-year residency at The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham a prestigious museum collection and community gallery. He begins on January 1st, 2026.
His focus for the residency year: Trees and Ecstasy. Building on the inverted tree imagery from his MA, he is exploring how specific natural phenomena particularly trees produce states of inexplicable ecstasy. "When I see the trees, something happens. I want to bring that feeling into the painting."
He is currently in the process of finding his stylisation a visual language that is entirely his own. He works with intuition, beginning each canvas with a single dot and surrendering to the mark-making process. The practice is about the threshold between potentiality and action, between control and surrender a visual translation of Sat-Chit-Ananda. He works across mediums without restriction: acrylic, pencil, even eyeliner on canvas.
He does not post work-in-progress on Instagram. He is building toward something whole.
Venue: Stroud Valley Art Space (SVA), Stroud, Southwest England
Atul's first solo exhibition in the UK. The theme, Tangled Reality, is a direct challenge to the assumption that what we sense is what is real. On the opening day of the exhibition, Atul receives news that a devotee friend from ISKCON, a social media connection, has been killed in communal violence in Bangladesh.
The very next day, he performs his most visceral and powerful work to date. He lays newspapers across the road until the crossing. The whole world is in the newspapers right now. He walks over them carrying a paintbrush loaded with red paint, holding it like a sword. After 13 rounds, the newspapers are splattered with red. The brush is a sword. The red is blood. The performance is about how power, political, ideological, and majority rule, shapes and shatters subjective reality. "Pure reality is very weak. Anything can make or change it."
It is also a private act of mourning, grief, and testimony.
University of Gloucestershire, Southwest England
Atul moves to the UK to pursue his Master of Arts in Fine Arts at the University of Gloucestershire. The international environment, with proximity to institutions like the Tate Modern and the vibrant London and southwest England gallery circuit, expands his thinking dramatically.
His MA research topic becomes "What is Real? / Tangled Reality," a deep philosophical inquiry into the limits of sensory perception. If our eyes cannot see beyond a few kilometers, and our ears can only register sounds below 20,000 Hz, are we perceiving reality or merely a fraction of it, filtered through the cage of our human senses?
This question, rooted in his Vedantic understanding of Maya and consciousness, becomes the conceptual architecture of his UK practice.
Venue : Niv Art Centre, Saket, New Delhi
Atul participates in the inaugural Bhavkala Collective, a landmark multidisciplinary exhibition curated by Sonakshi Agarwal at Niv Art Centre, Saket, New Delhi (6–7 July 2024). The exhibition spans visual art, performance, live music, slam poetry, and theatre, bringing together 20+ emerging artists.
Atul performs live through poetry, performance art, and music. His work at this event reflects the philosophical core he has been developing: art as a vehicle for spiritual questioning, for jigyasa, the Hindu tradition of inquiry through curiosity. "I want to give people a direction to think about God, not take them to God, but make them ask: what is this?" His art is deliberately layered, not immediately decodable. The mystery is intentional.
The Bhavkala Collective marks his arrival on the public art stage in India.
Physically present on campus, Atul continues his spiritual artistic practice while his teachers grow increasingly impatient with his subject matter. In one memorable assignment, students are asked to create work about the culture they belong to. Atul paints a luminous scene of sadhus dancing in ecstasy, the land of Vrindavan glowing in the background — monks surrounding him in states of devotion. His teacher says he's doing "the same thing again."
"You told me to make my life," Atul replies. "This is my life. If you take this out, there is only a body moving."
He creates a significant work during this period: "Krishna is Healing Me" (2023) — a painting that captures his direct, lived experience of divine grace. Around the same time, his idea crystallises: just as Arjuna used his bow for Krishna, I have only art — so I will use art for Krishna. This becomes his artistic manifesto.
He also begins experimenting with performance art, mentored by artist Jeetin Rangher (performance artist and guest lecturer at his college), who allows Atul's spiritual thinking to develop without trying to redirect it.
Through his undergraduate years, Atul continues painting spiritual subject matter while also exploring music, improvised spiritual songs, and poetry. He begins connecting art and music through the concept of flow, the state where the artist dissolves and becomes the instrument itself. This is the feeling he will spend the rest of his career chasing in his visual practice.
He is also sharpening his eye on international artists, particularly Olafur Eliasson (Danish-Icelandic artist based in Berlin), whose monumental environmental installations, such as bringing 12 massive icebergs from Greenland to a city street to melt publicly, deeply inspire Atul's understanding of what art can do to perception and social consciousness.
Lovely Professional University, Punjab
Atul joins Lovely Professional University, Punjab, just as India goes into lockdown. For a young artist with competitive energy, the forced stillness becomes a profound opening. He describes it as the phase where he "found meaning."
He begins reading deeply, first the philosophy of Sikhism, moved by the warriors who were ready to die for a true cause, and by the boundless love of Guru Nanak Dev Ji for all of humanity. He then turns to the Bhagavad Gita, immersing himself in Krishna's pastimes and philosophy. Something fundamental shifts.
"I started crying for no reason. Not from sadness, but from an overwhelming feeling of ecstasy. That is what I call mysticism."
His subject matter transforms entirely. He returns to the gods of his childhood, Hanuman and Shiva, but now with skill, depth, and genuine spiritual urgency. The hyperrealistic portraits are behind him. Spirituality is not a subject anymore. It is his life. He begins exploring what he will spend the next several years trying to articulate: ecstasy as artistic experience, Sat-Chit-Ananda.
In Class 11, Atul picks up Fine Arts as an optional subject — a decision that changes everything. He begins formal practice: copying works, doing landscapes, portraits, hyperrealistic drawings (God of War, lions, figure studies). In Class 12 CBSE board exams, he scores a perfect 100 out of 100 in Fine Arts. While the subject matter is still conventional at this stage, the technical foundations are being laid. He knows he is a good portraitist, a good draftsman. What he doesn't yet know is why he paints.
As a teenager, Atul begins writing social poetry, inspired by a school friend who was widely admired. He also takes up music, theater, and football — a classic Jack of all trades, driven not by a higher artistic calling yet, but by something equally important: the need to be seen, to compete, to prove himself. "I wasn't doing art to change the world. I was doing it because my friends were doing it and I had to show myself." Art becomes his arena of self-expression and self-worth, especially as he finds himself an average academic student — passing, but not excelling at conventional subjects.
Atul is born into a deeply spiritual household in Gurugram. His home is infused with the atmosphere of daily puja, devotion, and reverence — his parents are devout, and the language of the divine is his first language. The seeds of his lifelong artistic inquiry into spirituality are planted here, long before he picks up a brush.
Atul's earliest artistic memory is drawing gods — Hanuman being his great favourite, inspired by a beloved animated film. Influenced by his eldest sister, who had a natural talent for drawing and decorated school display boards with figures and designs, Atul begins copying her, developing his own visual instincts. One early quirk he remembers vividly: every god's belly must be square — not round, not muscular like a gym person, but square. Shiva, Hanuman, everyone. "That was my childhood logic," he says, laughing.
