PALO ALTO, CA.- Celebrate a special engagement with one of India's most distinguished contemporary artists, Seema Kohli and her acclaimed artwork for five-days this February 2026 across Palo Alto at Stanford University, the Pacific Art League, Palo Alto Art Center, and in Santa Clara at the Triton Museum.
Kohli’s limited-time Bay Area exhibition, Samsara & Metamorphosis: The Mystical World of Seema Kohli, and programming engagement is made possible by Laasya Art and founder Sonia Patwardhan. The exhibition will present Kohli’s most recent paintings, providing Bay Area collectors and art enthusiasts with a unique opportunity to view Kohli’s works in person.
Known for her intricate, surreal explorations of feminine power, Seema Kohli creates multilayered narratives drawn from mythology, spirituality, and philosophy. For over four decades, she has developed a distinctive body of work rooted in India’s ancient spiritual and mythological traditions, while remaining deeply connected to the concerns of the present. Rather than treating myth as a relic of the past, Kohli approaches it as a living, evolving language—one that brings together personal memory and lived experience to explore ideas of time, identity, and transformation. Her immersive visual worlds invite reflection and inner inquiry, offering viewers a space where ancient wisdom and contemporary life meet.
Her work is inspired by the generative forces of nature—its cycles of growth, dissolution, and renewal. Central to Kohli’s visual language is Shakti, the transformative power of the divine feminine. Kohli uses the womb as a potent symbol of creation and possibility, exploring transformation within the eternal cycles of birth and death. Kohli’s practice weaves together diverse philosophical traditions, informing her exploration of the body as a sacred vessel and a site of inner knowledge. Her use of 24-karat gold and silver leaf, textiles, metal, and recycled yarn evoke ritual, care, and reverence within material form.
Through what she describes as a process of “re-mythologizing” modern life, Kohli offers a powerful counterpoint to a fragmented world—reanimating the sacred feminine as a source of imagination, healing, and freedom, where the ancient and contemporary exist in luminous harmony.
A self-taught artist who believes each creator discovers their own visual language, she has developed a distinctive approach that honors women as powerful, spiritual beings. Her paintings incorporate sacred symbols—from lotus flowers to the Tree of Life—while delving into themes of identity, liberation, and the divine feminine.
Notes Kohli, “My work begins in the body and returns to it. I use myth as a tool, not to escape the present but to enter it more sharply, to hold what is unresolved: memory and rupture, desire and devotion, tenderness and violence. Through gilding, stitching, layering pigment, and inscribing yantras and texts, I build images as thresholds, spaces where the personal and the cosmic can collide without hierarchy. The faceless figure is not an absence; it is a refusal of fixed identity and a site of multiplicity, a body that can become archetype, witness, vessel. Repetition is central to my practice. It is labor, but also ritual, a daily sadhana through which the image arrives and the self is re-made. I want the work to act like a ritual: slow, durational, transformative, insisting that the sacred is immanent and made through attention.”
Kohli’s artistic journey reflects continual transformation and authenticity. Her practice spans painting, murals, films, installations, and sculpture, showcasing her remarkable versatility. Her work stands out for its mix of spiritual richness and contemporary relevance, exploring feminine identity, self-realization, and the pursuit of authenticity—ideas that resonate today while remaining rooted in timeless philosophical traditions.
