Topsy Turvy

Artist: Anurag Anand
Medium: Acrylic on Paper
Size: 16 × 11.5 inches (40.64 × 29.21 cm)
Year: 2025

Anurag Anand’s Topsy Turvy is a masterful exploration of landscape through a stylized and abstracted lens, where form and color converge to create a whimsical, yet contemplative visual experience. Executed in acrylic on paper, the composition features a hillside village rendered in simplified, geometric shapes, evoking a sense of structured playfulness that draws upon elements of Cubism and modern abstraction.

A collection of cream and beige-toned houses, depicted with flat planes and minimal detailing. These architectural forms, though spare, anchor the scene in a quiet harmony, while their placement across the sloping terrain introduces a sense of rhythm and balance. Anand’s deliberate flattening of perspective and reduction of detail create a visual language that is both sophisticated and accessible, allowing the viewer to engage with the scene as both image and idea.

Surrounding these built structures, the landscape unfolds in patches of muted purples, blues, browns, and greens, suggestive of distant hills and a dusky sky. The trees, stylized and vertically exaggerated, contribute a lyrical verticality that contrasts with the horizontal flow of the terrain. Rendered in an evocative palette of pinks, purples, browns, and deep greens, these organic forms echo the abstract sensibility of the overall composition, while also suggesting a natural world in flux, poised between stillness and motion. The work’s palette, punctuated by subtle touches of pale mustard-yellow and olive-green, adds depth and tonal variety, enriching the atmospheric quality of the painting. These chromatic fields are blended in a layered, almost collage-like manner, lending the piece both visual texture and a sense of meditative complexity.

The title Topsy Turvy hints at a conceptual underpinning that challenges conventional order, suggesting an inversion or reimagining of how we perceive space, place, and environment. This thematic playfulness is balanced by the compositional integrity of the work, where each element, architectural, arboreal, and chromatic, functions in harmonious dialogue. Signed and dated in the lower-left quadrant, the painting is not only a celebration of visual form, but also a poetic gesture toward the shifting boundaries of perception. In Topsy Turvy, Anurag Anand offers viewers a landscape that transcends the literal, transforming the everyday into an evocative meditation on abstraction, balance, and creative reinterpretation.