Siddharth Parasnis
Biography
Eternity #136 , 2024
Born in Pune, India, Siddharth Parasnis (b. 1977) is a contemporary artist who has been living and working in San Francisco since 2001, after arriving to pursue an MFA at the Academy of Art University. Through closely cropped compositions of layered shapes and forms of luminous colour, Parasnis explores the intersection of art, manmade structures, and landscape. His work captures the organic, natural forms of architecture, where tilted buildings and sharp angles metaphorically reflect the social energy and fragility of the landscapes human inhabit.
Each of Parasnis’s paintings embodies a unique color harmony, which the artist captures in a single session. He called this process as capturing ‘the soul of the painting’, giving it “life” or “birth.” Drawing inspiration from places he has lived and traveled - including India, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras - Parasnis filters reality through his imagination and unconsciousness. He transforms these memories into paintings that evolve into new relationships and dynamic energy.
From Edward Hopper’s ambiance to Willem de Kooning’s expressive brushstrokes, and the pre-modern Indian miniature painting techniques of layering images to convey depth and spatiality, Parasnis integrates a diverse array of artistic styles into a unique visual language of his own. Through the independent treatment of major colour fields and intense contrasts between hues, the artist masterfully balances the sense of physical spaces with the vibrant purity of colour and form.
Parasnis’s work has been shown at numerous venues in the U.S., Europe, and India, including museum exhibitions at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and the Bakersfield Art Museum, where his work was exhibited alongside that of Oliveira, Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Joan Brown, Theophilus Brown, and other renowned Bay Area artists.
Works
