In the middle of a bare room, a  rickety bed serves as the stage  for the drama of childhood. A  father and a child wrestle with  sleep, sheltered from the outside  world within the gossamer  cascade of a mosquito net.  The tousled bedspread bears  the marks of their play: when  passive, the girl is lulled to sleep  in her father’s arms; other times,  the father resigns himself to  her wakefulness. The intimacy  of a father and a daughter’s  relationship, captured in this  series of ten paintings, sets the  tone of Siji Krishnan’s exhibition,  0 + 0 = 0 (my father’s  mathematics), which opens at  Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke  this fortnight. 

The show is based on the  29-year-old painter’s life, and  is a cathartic exploration of  the memories of her father  who passed away in 2008. The  dark, delicate paintings appear  like moments remembered or  imagined through the prism  of anguished longing. “The  pain is inside me. Nobody can  understand it,” Krishnan told  Time Out in a phone interview from  Hyderabad, where she lives. “It’s  not going away from me. The only  way to recovery, to release this  pain, is through painting.” 

The title refers to Krishnan’s  father’s profession; he was an  accountant. The artist used  zero to allude to the entries she  found in her mother’s diary where  days upon days were marked  with the number, occasionally  accompanied by the word “empty”.  The formula in the title  evokes the emptiness  that the artist – and  her family – has felt  since the demise of her  father, she said. “He  could understand me in  many ways,” she said.  “I was very attached  to him.” 

The most explicit  expression of grief  is seen in Ophelia, in which  the artist casts herself in the  role of the ill-fated heroine of  Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Modelled  after John Everett Millais’s lush  1852 painting, Krishnan’s version  retains the imagery but draws out  the colour from the landscape. The  stricken protagonist floats on a  grey pool whose murky waters pull  her down to its dark core. 

As in Ophelia, Krishnan’s palette  remains dark through most of  the show. But in works such as  Transparency it acquires the  dreamy quality of night-time sky.  In this series of five paintings,  central motifs drawn from nature,  like a leaf, a nest, a feather, a  seed and a flower,  appear to float against  a dark background  punctuated by stars.  Each of the motifs  contains a female  figure, cocooned  within its papery  membranes. “The  present body of works  reveals Krishnan’s  reminiscences as an  infant child, a soft, supple doll, a  daughter, and the transformation  from this infantile child into  an adolescent girl, and then a  youthful young woman,” wrote  artist Rakhi Peswani in an  essay on the exhibition, noting  the progression between the  paintings. In Transparency,  nature allows the female figure  to blossom, while in Ophelia, it  envelops and reclaims her in her  uncontrollable grief. 

Krishnan’s turn towards nature,  and the theme’s intersection  with her continued engagement  with her memories of her father,  is at the centre of 0 + 0 = 0. Since  her MFA at the Sarojini Naidu  School of Fine Arts in Hyderabad,  which she completed in 2007,  Krishnan’s works have focussed  on her father. Earlier works, seen  in Paternal Instinct (2010), directly  dealt with the father figure. In that  show, Krishnan conflated gender  roles, giving the male protagonist  conspicuous pink breasts in order  to suggest that she saw her father  as a nurturer. 

Soon after, in works presented  at the 2011 India Art Summit,  Krishnan picked up the motif of  the spider web. In that series,  she also introduced a gamut of  insects entangled in twigs and  thorns draped by the lacework  threads of the web. The artist even  painted faces onto some of the  creatures. Though the imagery  appeared removed from her life,  the intent was still to represent  the autobiographical. Krishnan  described its use in a concept  note: “Like a spider, I began to  enjoy the process… of making  the web with the material from the  domain of one’s self. Just as the  web is an extension of the spider.” 

Her use of materials from the  world around her can be seen in  her current works, too, such as  Seeds (faces), in which human  faces are painted onto jacaranda  seeds. When she first chanced  upon the seeds, the artist said  she saw faces in them, which  compelled her to make the  paintings. They are akin to selfportraits,  she added. In another  work, Skirt, a female figure  emerges out of a heap of seeds.  Though the two paintings don’t  directly allude to the painter’s  attachment to her father, they  do evoke the melancholy and  isolation she has sought to  express in her work. “I want to  talk about the emptiness I feel,”  Krishnan said.  

0 + 0 = 0 (my father’s  mathematics) opens at  Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke on Fri Aug 10.