Sana Rao is a process based abstract artist living in London. Born and raised in India, her work explores contemporary abstract expressionism through the lens of Indian colours and elemental motifs. She is interested in the deconditioning and unlearning that emerges through her use of automatism. She views her practice as an act of pitching a tuning fork to intuitive body-based wisdom to create work that bypasses the rational and actively resists ideas of control. She paints barefoot with untreated and ungovernable materials like raw canvas, Indian inks and natural dye based pigments, employing gravity to co-create with. This process of creating with the grounded totality of her physical body, facilitates the continual practice of ego-death — removing the westernised idea of the individual self as an intermediary to unfiltered creation.
Having trained in India and the United States, her work is interested in what it means to be a practicing artist of Indian origin, creating outside of the western gaze. Selected exhibitions include Saatchi Art’s The Other Art Fair in London, CICA Museum in Korea and The Design Museum in London.
