Shivani Mithbaokar

Decorative motifs resembling female anatomies—drawn from wallpaper patterns, fabrics, found furniture, and the architectural carvings of the artist’s immediate environment, such as brownstone facades—make their way into her paintings. She reimagines these floral baroque forms as abstract bodies, exploring their interiority and exteriority. She treats the body as a landscape of accumulated experiences, weaving personal mythologies by intertwining the intimate with the ornamental. In doing so, she challenges the conditioned self-image shaped by societal hierarchies of gender, caste, and diasporic dislocation. As she navigates this fragmented terrain of selfhood, she creates space for a multidimensional self—mapping and commemorating healing pathways from self-erasure to self-liberation.

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Shivani Mithbaokar (b. 1993, Mumbai, India) is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work constructs interior worlds intertwining decorative motifs that resemble female anatomies - where she treats the body as a landscape, to navigate its psychological states of healing and transformation using diverse materiality of wallpaper, fabrics and found objects. She received her BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design in 2018 and recently completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the Pratt Institute. She has shown her work at Yui Gallery (New York, NY), 440 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Greenpoint Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and Arsenal Gallery (New York, NY) amongst others. She has also participated in Zine festivals in the US and India such as MoCCA Arts Fest (New York, NY), Bombay Underground Festival (Mumbai, India), and her zines can be found at Printed Matter and Domino Books.

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