Some paintings ask you to look for a recognisable landscape. Jayshree Savani's works ask you to feel one instead. Currently being presented at FPH Gallery, Nariman Point, from September 19 to September 30, her latest exhibition, Biophilia, brings together this intuitive relationship between colour, nature and emotion.
Inside Biophilia where colour takes the lead
According to Savani, the exhibition takes its name from the human instinct to connect with nature and the living world. For her, that idea extends beyond landscapes. It also connects with her fascination with cosmology and her belief in the larger forces that shape the universe.
“My inspiration behind my painting is my love for the nature and the living world around us, my interest in cosmology,” she says.
There is very little rigidity in Savani’s process. Her canvases move through layers of colour, with acrylics allowing her to work between transparency and opacity. She uses brushes, her hands and palette knives to build texture, often allowing the paint to determine where the work goes next.
Colour takes over the canvas in unexpected ways - pooling, dripping, colliding and building into textured abstract worlds that can feel at once natural, cosmic and deeply personal.
“My abstract painting style is deeply organic and intuitive, guided more by feeling than by rigid structure,” she explains. “I work with a free-flowing approach where colours are allowed to move, drip, merge, and evolve naturally on the surface.”
Dripping and layering become an important part of this process. Rather than correcting every unexpected mark, Savani allows those moments to become part of the final work. “The drips are not accidents but moments of spontaneity that bring energy and life to the composition,” she says.
Abstract landscapes with emotional connections
The works often move between vibrant oranges, pinks, greens, blues and softer muted fields, with scraped surfaces and darker lines adding another layer to the compositions. Looking at them, one can find traces of landscapes without being given a fixed landscape to identify.
“Many describe my work as translating a feeling or emotion that a landscape has left within me, and I just love this explanation, it is true, our subconscious resonating with our natural world,” Savani says.
That openness is intentional. She usually avoids naming individual paintings because she does not want to dictate what the viewer should see.
“As an abstract, there are myriad possibilities of interpretation. That’s the reason I usually don’t title individual works, for I want each viewer to enjoy their own interpretation.”
A personal dedication
Biophilia also carries a deeply personal significance for Savani. She dedicates the exhibition to her father, Mahendrabhai Shah, whose influence shaped her relationship with the ideas behind the work.
“This has been mainly imbibed by pappa Mahendrabhai Shah. I dedicate this show to him. We lost him just 15 days back but I feel his presence with me in this show,” she says.
For Savani, that presence sits alongside her larger belief in nature and the universe. “Our Universe and the living world in it - is the all pervading force,” she says. Biophilia, in that sense, becomes less about explaining nature and more about allowing viewers to find their own connection to it.
More details:
Where: Gallery FPH, Free Press House, Nariman Point, Mumbai
When: September 19 to September 30, 2026
