Bikash Chandra Senapati

Bikash Chandra Senapati is an artist from the coastal town of Kendrapara, Odisha. He completed a BFA in Painting from Chitra Kala Parisath, Bengaluru, in 2013, and an MFA in Printmaking from Indira Kala Sangeet Vishwavidyalaya, Khairagarh, in 2019.

His early interest lay in acute observation of his environment; he sketched and drew throughout his youth before formally studying visual art from Grade 11. His undergraduate years in Bengaluru marked a significant transition  leaving home, and navigating language, distance, and the unfamiliar rhythms of city life. Afterward, he travelled across New Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Udaipur before settling in Vadodara, where he now lives and works. Engaging closely with varied social and cultural contexts during this time shaped his sensitivity to lived experience, and drew him toward experimenting with materiality and process; an interest he carried into his postgraduate work in printmaking.

His practice spans woodcut, etching, acrylic on canvas, and pen on paper, foregrounding memories and observations of the tension between rural and urban life. As a child, he turned marks into free birds as shapes that could move, migrate, transition. That same impulse still drives his work: he neither sketches nor photographs beforehand, resisting the urge to fix a moment immediately. He reminisces, then builds from memory rather than record. Working in pen and ink rather than pencil is a deliberate refusal of the eraser — every addition and deletion stays visible, nothing taken back.

Drawing remains his primary language. It is a meditative, grounding process through which forms open onto conversations between past and present, movement and stillness. As he puts it: "my lines emerge intuitively: sometimes quiet and organic, echoing the fluidity of rural terrain; sometimes structured and geometric, responding to the order and pressure of urban spaces." Recounting from memory, observation, and encounters with people across geographies, he builds layered narratives of displacement and belonging.

His solo exhibitions include SAMA, Udaipur (2025) and NIROOPAN: Representation of Nature's Eternal Journey at Triveni Gallery, New Delhi (2021). He has participated widely in group exhibitions across India, including Open Fences at Gallery XXL, New Delhi (2026), Baroda Unbound: City as Studio at Exhibit 320, New Delhi (2025), HYD Art, Hyderabad (2025), the New Delhi Satellite Event of the 8th International Biennale of Non-Objective Arts (2025), Shape Shifters & Storytellers at Archer Art Gallery, Ahmedabad (2025), Voices From India by SOS Art at Nine Fish Art Gallery, Mumbai (2025), Print From Our Adda at Nine Fish Art Gallery, Mumbai (2025), IMPRINT Printmaking Art Exhibition at The Art Route Gallery, Gurugram (2025), Printed Voices From India by SOS Art at Kennedy Heights Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA (2024), Memories 2: The Book Art Show at The Art Route Gallery, Gurugram (2024), and the Kochi-Muziris Student Biennale, Kochi (2019), among others.

Bikash has received several awards and fellowships, including the Chandraangan Residency, Udaipur (2025), Summer Residency at Space Studio, Baroda (2025), Junior Fellowship by the Center for Cultural Resources and Training (CCRT), Ministry of Culture, Government of India (2023–24), the 96th AIFACS Award in Drawing, New Delhi (2023), the ABIR First Take Award, Ahmedabad (2022), the State Award in Printmaking from Odisha Lalit Kala Akademi, Bhubaneshwar (2021), the KHOJ Support Grant, New Delhi (2020), and the J.D. Gondhalekar Award at the Lokmanya Tilak 33rd Art Exhibition, Pune (2020).