Pooja Pittie: Undercurrent

The exhibition Undercurrent highlights a decade of artwork by intuitive artist Pooja Pittie (b.1977 Mumbai) in her first major museum exhibition. The selection of works will survey Pittie’s creative energy in progress, while she adjusts her practice in search of balance, living with a progressive muscular disability. Undercurrent features 40-50 paintings, drawings, and fiber works by the Chicago-based artist that emphasize the artist’s determination to articulate the bodymind experience through material exploration.

Praised for her large seductive abstract paintings since 2015, Pittie has had to shift her mark-making gestures to accommodate her changing body. The result is a masterful exploration of hand-crocheted objects informed by painting. Through experiencing Pittie’s work, the viewer is invited to enter a tactile, meditative space to reflect on our relationship with the body in the built environment. This exhibition, public program, and related catalog is dedicated to the relevance and context of Pittie’s work in a society that renders disability invisible.

Pooja Pittie is a painter and fiber artist born in Mumbai, India, and based in Chicago, Illinois. Her work explores the "bodymind," a concept from disability studies that understands body and mind as a single system shaped by lived experience. Living with a progressive form of muscular dystrophy, Pittie builds abstract paintings from color as felt sensation alongside fiber works: crocheted and knitted biomorphic forms and works on paper layered and threaded with yarn and linen that reward sustained, close attention and labor. Across both, she treats constraint as the condition from which her practice emerges rather than an obstacle to it. Pittie's work is held in public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; and University of Chicago, as well as private collections internationally.