Delhi-based Contemporary Artist Seema Kohli
Pacific Art League
February 27 – March 1, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, February 27, 5:30 to 8:30pm
January 2026, Palo Alto, CA –Celebrate a special engagement with one of India’s most distinguished contemporary artists, Seema Kohli and her acclaimed artwork for five-days this February 2026 across Palo Alto at Stanford University, the Pacific Art League, Palo Alto Art Center, and in Santa Clara at the Triton Museum. Kohli’s limited-time Bay Area exhibition, Samsara & Metamorphosis: The Mystical World of Seema Kohli, and programming engagement is made possible by Laasya Art and founder Sonia Patwardhan. The exhibition will present Kohli’s most recent paintings, providing Bay Area collectors and art enthusiasts with a unique opportunity to view Kohli’s works in person. Known for her intricate, surreal explorations of feminine power, Seema Kohli creates multilayered narratives drawn from mythology, spirituality, and philosophy. For over four decades, she has developed a distinctive body of work rooted in India’s ancient spiritual and mythological traditions, while remaining deeply connected to the concerns of the present.
Rather than treating myth as a relic of the past, Kohli approaches it as a living, evolving language—one that brings together personal memory and lived experience to explore ideas of time, identity, and transformation. Her immersive visual worlds invite reflection and inner inquiry, offering viewers a space where ancient wisdom and contemporary life meet. Her work is inspired by the generative forces of nature—its cycles of growth, dissolution, and
renewal. Central to Kohli’s visual language is Shakti, the transformative power of the divine feminine. Kohli uses the womb as a potent symbol of creation and possibility, exploring transformation within the eternal cycles of birth and death. Kohli’s practice weaves together diverse philosophical traditions, informing her exploration of the body as a sacred vessel and a site of inner knowledge. Her use of 24-karat gold and silver leaf, textiles, metal, and recycled yarn evoke ritual, care, and reverence within material form. Through what she describes as a process of “re-mythologizing” modern life, Kohli offers a powerful counterpoint to a fragmented world—reanimating the sacred feminine as a source of imagination, healing, and freedom, where the ancient and contemporary exist in luminous harmony.
A self-taught artist who believes each creator discovers their own visual language, she has developed a distinctive approach that honors women as powerful, spiritual beings. Her paintings incorporate sacred symbols—from lotus flowers to the Tree of Life—while delving into themes of identity, liberation, and the divine feminine. Notes Kohli, “My work begins in the body and returns to it. I use myth as a tool, not to escape the present but to enter it more sharply, to hold what is unresolved: memory and rupture, desire and devotion, tenderness and violence. Through gilding, stitching, layering pigment, and inscribing yantras and texts, I build images as thresholds, spaces where the personal and the cosmic can collide without hierarchy. The faceless figure is not an absence; it is a refusal of fixed identity and a site of multiplicity, a body that can become archetype, witness, vessel. Repetition is central to my practice. It is labor, but also ritual, a daily sadhana through which the image arrives and the self is re-made. I want the work to act like a ritual: slow, durational, transformative, insisting that the sacred is immanent and made through attention.”
Kohli’s artistic journey reflects continual transformation and authenticity. Her practice spans painting, murals, films, installations, and sculpture, showcasing her remarkable versatility. Her work stands out for its mix of spiritual richness and contemporary relevance, exploring feminine identity, self-realization, and the pursuit of authenticity—ideas that resonate today while remaining rooted in timeless philosophical traditions.
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Special Events (full programming descriptions below)
February 24: Workshop: Triton Museum, Santa Clara, 11 am – 1:30 pm
February 24: Artist Talk and Poetry Narration: Stanford University, 7pm
February 25: Workshop: Pacific Art League, 11 am – 1:30 pm, Palo Alto, CA
February 26: Artist Talk: Palo Alto Art Center at 6:30 pm
February 27 – March 1: Exhibition at Pacific Art League, Palo Alto, CA
Seema Kohli, Rising of the Kundalini-Spiritual Awakening, Acrylic and ink with 24 carat gold and silver leaf Seema Kohli: Exhibition & Events, February 2026
Exhibition at Pacific Art League
Samsara & Metamorphosis: The Mystical World of Seema Kohli
Friday, February 27 – Sunday, March 1, 2026
Open to the public: 11 am – 6 pm
Opening Reception:
Friday, February 27, 5.30 – 8.30 pm
Event Programming Schedule
1) Workshop at Pacific Art League
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
11 am – 1.30 pm
Title: The Texture of Remembering
Description: This immersive workshop invites participants (18+) to explore how sense memory—smell, taste, sound, and vision—shapes consciousness and the politics of aesthetics. Led by artist Seema Kohli, the program introduces Kaala Netra (“the eye of time”) and its role in activating memory through sensory experience. Through guided sensory exercises, field notes, and hands-on experimentation, participants will learn how to use the senses to trace personal, inherited, and collective memories across different layers of consciousness. Attendees are encouraged to bring a small object connected to their personal history to deepen the experience.
2) Artist talk at Stanford University, Palo Alto
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
7 – 8.15 pm
Title: I AM
Description: In this reflective talk, artist Seema Kohli will share personal insights on self-discovery, being true to one’s self, and the transformative power of deep inner work. Through art and lived experience, she explores how redesigning the self from within can renew both body and mind. She will lead the audience through her journey with an immersive animated projection that gradually reveals her art. This talk invites listeners into a contemplative space, offering art and poetry as a guide for inner transformation.
3) Workshop at Triton Museum, Santa Clara
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
11 am – 1.30 pm
Title: The Texture of Remembering
Description: This immersive workshop invites participants (18+) to explore how sense memory—smell, taste, sound, and vision—shapes consciousness and the politics of aesthetics. Led by artist Seema Kohli, the program introduces Kaala Netra (“the eye of time”) and its role in activating memory through sensory experience. Through guided sensory exercises, field notes, and hands-on experimentation, participants will learn how to use the senses to trace personal, inherited, and collective memories across different layers of consciousness. Attendees are encouraged to bring a small object connected to their personal history to deepen the experience.
4) Artist Talk at Palo Alto Art Center in collaboration with SACHI
Thursday, February 26, 2026
6.30 – 8.15 pm
Event Title: The Body: Inner and Outer Worlds
Description: Drawing from her exhibition Samsara & Metamorphosis: The Mystical World of Seema Kohli, currently on view at the Pacific Art League in Palo Alto, artist Seema Kohli will reflect on themes of continuity, meditation, and the dialogue between her inner and outer worlds. Framed through cosmic dualities—sky and earth, sun and moon, within and without—the talk will touch on the mandala as a mental and cosmic structure of balance and order. With bija mantra recitations and insights connecting a mandala installation gifted by SACHI to the Palo Alto Art Center, this talk offers a resonant exploration of art, reflection, and interconnectedness.
About the Artist Seema Kohli (b. 1960) is a multi-disciplinary artist working through the imagination of mythical and fantastical worlds from a eco feminist eye. Engaging with visual and performative mediums, Kohli explores the themes of beauty and sensuality echoed in philosophy and spirituality studies across civilization. Her work primarily celebrates the cosmic feminine and its relationship to forces of creation and destruction. There is a focused engagement with the concept of Hiranayagarbha or The Golden Womb; she attempts to create new artistic identities by reshaping belongings, bringing the past and the present into a dialogue through a process of decay, hybridization and transformation.
For Kohli, an experimental artist, poetry is a recorded conversation between her, the canvas, and the rendered image. Where they are all living conscious being worthy of responding with emotions and sensitivity. Though she has been performing to her poetry as narratives, in 2013 she self-published a compilation of verses, “I Am” which was performed at TEDx, Chennai. The second book “Experiencing The Goddesses” she is co-author and editor. She is already working on co-authoring the third book, and one which is a compilation of her own poetry written in the last 17 years.
Spanning over five decades of experiments in form and language, Kohli’s works live in multiple museums and institutional collections all over the world, including the British Museum (UK), MAP, Bangalore, India, Kiran Nadar Museum of Arts (India), Partition Museum, Birth Rites Collection (UK), Rubin Museum (USA, Phoenix Museum of Art (Arizona, USA) Bihar Museum(Patna), Bharat Bhavan, Lalit Kala Akademie (India) NGMA(Bangalore) to name a few. Kohli’s several large–scale murals, are acquired by Supreme Court (New Delhi), Sardar Patel Bhawan (Patna, Bihar), Delhi and Mumbai International Airports, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and many more. Her works have also been shown at collateral events such as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), Venice Biennale of Art/Architecture (2015, 2016), ARCO (Madrid,2008), Art Basel, and at the India Art Fair (2010-2024), Asia Society HK, among many others. Kohli has also been an invited speaker at several conferences and institutions, including TEDx (2012), WIN Conference (2013-2015), NGMA
(Bangalore, 2010, 2014, 2016), Harvard University, University of California at Davis, University of Chicago, University of Connecticut and the University of Buffalo to name a few. Kohli lives and works in New Delhi, India.
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For more information, images, and interviews, contact:
Wendy Norris, Norris Communications
(415) 307-3853; wendy@norriscommunications.biz
For more information about these events, to schedule a private viewing, please contact Sonia Patwardhan, director and founder of Laasya Art at info@laasyaart.com or call +1 650-770-9088.
As the founder of Laasya Art, Sonia Patwardhan has spent over a decade connecting global collectors with exceptional contemporary and traditional Indian artists. Under her leadership, Laasya Art has become a trusted destination for thoughtfully curated artworks and personalized advisory services.
Laasya Art is a premier gallery specializing in contemporary Indian art, located in Palo Alto, CA. The gallery is dedicated to presenting exceptional works by established and emerging Indian artists to collectors and art enthusiasts in the Bay Area and beyond.
