Untitled

Artist: Anurag Anand
Medium: Mix Media on Paper
Size: 12 x 16 inches (30.48 × 40.64 cm)
Year: 2024

This striking abstract cityscape unfolds through a careful orchestration of shape, tone, and spatial rhythm. Employing a muted background palette of browns, deep grays, and blacks, the artist creates a subdued yet emotionally charged atmosphere, suggestive of twilight or memory. Against this atmospheric backdrop, fragmented and overlapping forms in light and dark rose-pink tones emerge, evoking the vertical presence of buildings and the organic contours of trees.

The composition resists literal depiction, choosing instead to focus on the expressive possibilities of form and color. Architectural and natural elements are distilled into stylized shapes, layered and juxtaposed to suggest urban density and visual movement. These symbolic forms, simplified, flattened, and rhythmically arranged, give the painting a quiet dynamism, emphasizing harmony and contrast rather than realistic detail. The use of rose and pink tones amidst the otherwise neutral palette adds a subtle tension to the work. These hues act as both focal points and connective tissue across the canvas, weaving together the built and organic elements of the imagined cityscape. The darker values anchor the composition, providing depth and shadow, while the lighter values suggest soft illumination or reflective surfaces, creating a meditative balance between solidity and atmosphere.

Simplified tree forms rendered in dark and neutral tones contribute to the sense of abstraction, blurring the line between the natural and the constructed. Their presence, understated yet intentional, adds a layer of symbolism, perhaps pointing to the persistence of nature within urban spaces, or the merging of memory and environment within the painter’s mind. Work is its ability to evoke place without specifying it. Viewers are invited into a mood or an impression rather than a geographic location, allowing personal interpretation and emotional response to guide their experience. The painting offers a quiet reflection on space, its textures, silences, and overlays, filtered through abstraction. The work exemplifies a sophisticated command of color relationships and compositional restraint. It speaks to a modernist lineage while remaining deeply contemporary in its mood and intent. The abstraction is not distancing but intimate, drawing viewers into a contemplative state where memory, landscape, and emotion converge. This painting is less about the city as a place and more about the city as a feeling, layered, transient, and quietly resonant.