Alpenglühen brings together the practices of Piyush Bavalia and Dev Chandra through a shared engagement with mountain landscapes as perceptual, emotional, and atmospheric spaces. Rather than approaching landscape as a site of depiction, both artists treat terrain as a condition of experience shaped through memory, silence, material transformation, and transitional light.

The exhibition takes its title from the alpine phenomenon in which mountain peaks absorb and reflect the residual glow of dawn or dusk. Here, light operates not as spectacle, but as a shifting atmospheric force that alters perception, dissolves boundaries, and mediates relationships between distance and proximity, surface and depth, interiority and vastness.

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Though rooted in the visual language of mountainous terrain, the works resist stable geography. Mountains, valleys, horizons, and lunar forms appear less as topographical locations than as psychological and phenomenological structures. Across the exhibition, landscape becomes a space through which states of stillness, contemplation, solitude, and emotional suspension are negotiated.

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Bavalia’s works emerge through processes of accumulation, erosion, and material layering. Working with acrylic, pigment, paper, sawdust, plywood, and ceramic elements, he constructs surfaces that behave less like windows into landscape and more like sedimented terrains themselves. Texture functions as both image and material event.

 

Layers compress and fragment space, allowing forms to surface gradually through abrasion, concealment, and tonal transition. His landscapes remain intimate and tactile, shaped through restraint rather than spectacle. Light appears diffusely absorbed into mineral-like surfaces, suspended within muted chromatic fields, and dispersed across fragmented mountain forms. These works slow perception, inviting prolonged attention to surface, silence, and atmospheric density.

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In contrast, Dev Chandra constructs landscape through spatial recession, symbolic form, and atmospheric depth. His paintings unfold as expansive psychological environments shaped by layered horizons, distant illumination, moons, towers, clouds, and isolated architectural presences. Drawing from traditions of Romantic landscape, surrealist spatial construction, and cinematic atmosphere, Chandra approaches mountains not as physical structures alone, but as emotional and metaphysical states. Recurrent symbols function as markers of solitude, memory, contemplation, and inner distance. Through restrained compositions and luminous gradients, the paintings produce environments suspended between dusk, dream, and silence. Human presence remains implied rather than visible, emerging through traces, structures, and intervals of emptiness distributed across vast terrain.

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Despite their differing material and spatial approaches, both practices share a sustained interest in atmosphere as structure. Silence is not treated as absence, but as an active perceptual condition. The exhibition unfolds through shifts between compression and expansiveness, tactile proximity and distant luminosity, geological materiality and psychological space.

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Within Alpenglühen, mountains cease to function as static motifs of nature or sublimity. Instead, they become thresholds sites where light, memory, material process, and emotional perception converge. The exhibition proposes landscape not as scenery to be observed from afar, but as a space to inhabit slowly, through attention, duration, and sensory encounter.