The Lost City

Artist: Anurag Anand
Medium: Acrylic on Canvas
Size: 48 × 36 inches (121.92 × 91.44 cm)
Year: 2024

Anurag Anand’s The Lost City is a poignant, large-scale acrylic on canvas that delicately weaves memory, architecture, and atmosphere into a layered visual narrative. Infused with an air of melancholic reverie, the composition presents a dreamlike urban topography that hovers between the real and the imagined, the historical and the contemporary.

The foreground introduces the viewer to a modest, light brown-toned structure, perhaps a forgotten shelter or remnant of domestic life, from which two small birds perch, symbolic sentinels amidst a world in quiet decay. Adjacent to this humble building, a cluster of stylized, reddish-brown foliage introduces a warm, organic rhythm to the composition, drawing attention to nature’s quiet persistence even in environments touched by time.

Progressing toward the mid-ground, a dense accumulation of aging buildings, rendered in an evocative palette of tans, muted browns, and greys, constructs a narrative of urban sprawl and forgotten heritage. The variation in rooflines and structural facades suggests an archeological layering of civilization, vestiges of a once-vibrant city, now suspended in time. Anand’s nuanced brushwork conveys a painterly softness while preserving the tactile character of the architecture, reinforcing the sense of layered temporality.

A central body of water, painted in desaturated, inky blues, forms a natural and symbolic divide, separating the cityscape into distinct zones. Along one shoreline, buildings appear densely set, almost clinging to the land, while across the divide, an island emerges, crowned with sparse trees and a solitary boat, an emblem of passage, memory, or retreat. This dichotomy between inhabited and untouched, past and present, evokes the essence of a city lost not to destruction, but to slow transformation and fading recollection. Above, the sky, tinged with grey-purple and softly glowing pale yellow light, contributes to the ethereal mood. The junction between sky and water, imbued with subtle luminescence, appears as a liminal space, perhaps signifying hope, transcendence, or the invisible boundary between the seen and the remembered.

The Lost City stands as a poetic meditation on urban memory, disappearance, and the invisible threads that connect built environments to emotional geographies. Through its contemplative tone and sophisticated formal balance, Anand’s work speaks to the fragility and endurance of place, inviting viewers to navigate not just a visual landscape, but the layered sediments of human experience etched upon it.