Sunaina Khandelwal
Painter
Lives and works in Toronto, Canada

Sunaina Khandelwal is an Artist and Independent Curator who has graduated with an MA in Fine Art from the University of the Arts London, UK. She is currently residing in Toronto and her practice explores the status and meaning of colour within the contemporary art world.
Khandelwal believes that colour is often perceived merely as a picture making tool whilst the significance of its pre-existing ideologies and histories are overlooked. As a result, her work is concerned with how the pigments we painters use today, are contemporary re-enactments of their historic selves by manifesting an essence of a cultural past that is embedded within their materiality.
The artist often creates her own pigments from clay, rocks and charcoal in order to reference fragments of a cultural history from a contemporary position. The process of hammering, crushing, mixing and grinding the pigment into a paste plays an integral role in Khandelwal's practice since this resonates with how colours were first created during the prehistoric era.
"Through this process, the artist is able to retrace pigment history from a contemporary perspective. Alongside the use of handmade pigment, Khandelwal's artworks incorporate readymade oil paints as she looks to question how the specific categorisation of these contemporary colours can challenge our visual perceptions of the artworks we encounter. "