04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Heart to Art Conversations
Her paintings are visual poetry, knuckled with raw emotions. In her solo exhibition, Untamed Heart, showing after a gap of 18 years, in Mumbai, artist Laila Khan Furniturewalla dedicates her artworks to her parents, Sundri and actor-filmmaker Feroz Khan. 'Some works have been in the making for years, while others emerged more recently, but all of them come from the same space of honesty and exploration. This exhibition is deeply personal and emotive,' she says. Why call it Untamed Heart? 'Through this collection, I wanted my heart to speak in its purest form,' she smiles.
Slivers of burnished gold, a hushed collusion of reflective materials and expressions of the tuskered god run through the collection of 30 artworks. 'Gold has always carried a sense of divinity and transcendence and naturally became part of my work due to its deep-rooted significance in religious and spiritual art,' she says. Across cultures and traditions from Hindu and Buddhist temples, Mughal miniatures, Byzantine mosaics, and Renaissance and Baroque paintings, gold symbolises prosperity, divinity, and enlightenment. In India, gold is observed with immense sanctity across all religions, exuding an aura of spirituality. It is this profound symbolism that drew her towards weaving gold into her art.
