Mona Sharma's practice examines lived space as an emotional and psychological site rather than a purely architectural one. Working from her immediate surroundings, homes she has lived in, and spaces she has occupied, she treats them as repositories of memory, intimacy, and lived experience. While her subjects appear ordinary, they are charged with personal and collective resonance shaped by time, attachment, and repetition.
Colour functions as a primary language in her work; she employs a vibrant palette to articulate layered emotions and fragmented memories, allowing colour to carry what architecture and objects cannot. Rather than representing space as it exists, she paints how it is remembered, filtered through emotion, absence, and duration, drawn to the way spaces continue to live within us long after we leave them, and how memory transforms the physical into something internal and enduring. Alongside painting, she works with cement as a material that brings slowness and resistance into her practice. Unlike memory, which is fluid and shifting, cement is heavy and demanding, allowing time, pressure, and process to remain visible on the surface; she does not try to fully control the material, instead allowing its natural changes and imperfections to become part of the work. Across both canvas and cement, she thinks of space as something felt rather than clearly defined, reflecting how environments stay with us long after we leave them, leaving quiet impressions rather than fixed images. By focusing on material, surface, and process, she creates work that invites pause and personal reflection, allowing viewers to connect their own memories of space with what they encounter.
Born in 1997, Sharma is based in Indore, India, and completed her B.F.A. (2022) and M.F.A. (2024) in Painting from the Government College of Fine Art, Indore. She had her solo exhibition A Mind Within a Space at Method, Mumbai (2023), and has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Mangoes and Meanings at the Museum of Goa (2026), Still I Rise at Shailja Art Gallery, Gurgaon (2026), Nature of Us and Fresh Produce at Method, Mumbai and Delhi (2025), the Abhivyakti City Art Project, Ahmedabad (2025), Confluence at Alliance Française, Bhopal (2024), the Student Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2023), the Rajya Rupankar State Exhibition, Khajuraho (2023), and shows at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal (2022) and the Jahangir Art Gallery CAF camp, Mumbai (2023), among others, affirming her growing presence in contemporary Indian art.
