About the Artist
Sanam Bakshi
Sanam Bakshi is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, stained glass, metal, and monumental sculptural installations embedded within architecture and public space.
Self-taught and privately trained in art from early childhood, she began painting at the age of five. Recognizing her natural inclination toward solitude, her father converted a room in their home into a studio and study space, where she spent long hours working independently.
She is a graduate of the prestigious Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and completed a design course at Parsons School of Design, New York. Her artistic practice, however, remains internally guided—shaped by instinct and discipline, and by a deliberate refusal of spectacle or sensationalism.
Bakshi has devoted much of her life to the spiritual path, spending years with her Zen master ‘Dolano’ in Pune. She is not religious. Her work reflects a belief in clarity, stillness, and innocence as states worth preserving.
A committed vegan for the animals, Bakshi’s ethical worldview informs her artistic decisions. Animals appear frequently in her work—not as anthropomorphized symbols or deities, but as beings she regards as fundamentally innocent, unmarked by the cruelty humans are capable of.
She believes art need not shock or scandalize to be meaningful. Instead, she pursues beauty as a stabilizing force—one that arrests the viewer mid-thought, calms the mind, and restores perception. Light, particularly when transmitted through glass, plays a central role in this intention, even when addressing darker social realities such as the historical mistreatment of widows in India.
Bakshi lives and works internationally, developing works that emphasize light, material integrity, and emotional stillness over spectacle.
She has worked at monumental scale from an early age, yet much of her work remains held in private collections. Her practice is marked by an uncommon devotion to craft—producing works of extreme intricacy and patience, unconcerned with immediacy or commercial urgency.