Roberts Projects is pleased to present the gallery’s first exhibition with artist Suchitra Mattai, In the absence of power. In the presence of love. The show presents new mixed-media paintings, tapestries, and a soft-sculpture installation that evoke the artist’s Indo-Caribbean heritage. Mattai’s work engages with the subject and form of European pastoral landscapes and figuration as well as Indian miniature paintings. Linking craft-based processes, sumptuous weavings and traditional techniques, the artist portrays resolute brown heroines, replacing heroes and colonizers and reclaiming a patriarchal past.

Mattai describes her process as one of “brown reclamation,” reworking original images to tell new stories. Embroidery, needlepoint, beading and found objects insert women’s handiwork into the traditional painterly landscapes. In other works, the heroic stories, figures, animals, patterns, and landscapes of Indian miniature paintings are reconfigured. Here, the heroes are replaced by heroines—empowered and mythic, yet empathetic and accessible. They are peaceful warriors and include both the young and the old. In future perfect (2023), a woman quietly reads of the future surrounded by floral needlepoints and a black beaded halo, combining myth, memory, and folktales.

Suchitra Mattai (b.1973 Georgetown, Guyana; based in Los Angeles) is a multi-disciplinary artist of Indo-Caribbean descent. Mattai received her MFA in painting and drawing and MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Upcoming solo exhibitions include ICA San Francisco, CA and Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY. Her work is represented in numerous public collections.