Artist
Priya Ilango paints the tangle, the talk, and the quiet of human closeness — bodies that fold into one another, women lost in conversation, figures finally at rest.
Begin the story ↓
Every painter's life has a thread. Priya's, today, is the knot itself: the labyrinth of how we hold, crowd, lose and find one another. Follow the thread back and it leads to the women whose conversations she grew up watching in the small towns of South India — and further still, to where it all began: single figures learning to take up space.
Scroll on. The story is told the way memory works — backwards, from the newest canvas to the first.
2024 – present · The knot of relationships
“The complexities in relationships and their interdependence in all forms of life fascinate me. Twisted and knitted, they continue to flow into one another — complex, convoluted, intertwined and yet comfortable. Human forms that fit into each other perfectly well and exist in the most difficult positions, stretched out in unnatural ways to slide into each other's physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual spaces.”
“Are these spaces created organically or intentionally — or are we just forced into them? As the bodies that take up these spaces, are we conscious of how much we push the other out to find our own comfort zone? Is there a limit to how much space we allow the other to fit in? What defines the limit?”
— Priya Ilango, on the Labyrinthine series
The conversation is paramount at that moment. Everything else has to wait.
Priya Ilango
2023 · The women who raised her eye
“My visits to family and friends in small towns in my adolescence left a deep impact on me. Nostalgic memories of the vivid colours on floors and walls, hottest of summers, coolest of houses, narrow lanes with row houses — hearing the neighbour snore through the regular power cuts. The one thing that was most engaging were the conversations.”
“The women string together fresh fragrant jasmine while they catch up on the affairs of the family and the neighbourhood, totally oblivious of the surroundings. As they play Pallanguzhi, a traditional South Indian board game, mid-game conversations become so much more interesting. Draped in soft hand-woven cotton saris, sitting on the red oxide floor, engrossed — the pause in the game is temporary. Nothing else interrupts their flow. The banana tree, a symbol of procreation, is possibly leaning in to give its point of view.”
— Priya Ilango, on the Conversations series
Repose is not idleness. It is arrival.
From the Unbound years
2019 – 2022 · Where it began
Before the crowds and the conversations, there was one figure at a time. These early canvases are studies in permission — a body allowed to sprawl across a couch under a night-blue sky, to dissolve into lotus and vine, to simply rest without apology. Here Priya taught herself the language she still speaks: bold flat colour, the honest weight of a body, and the radical idea that repose is not idleness but arrival.
Priya Ilango's earliest memories of growing up in the South Indian city of Chennai remain steeped in art and aesthetics. Watching her father, the celebrated artist A V Ilango, ruminating on the quintessence of the elusive line — drawing out forms from its earthy and rural roots on large canvases — Priya's earliest artistic influence has grown over the years to remain the strongest.
Childhood visits to the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai were the portal to the gloriously fascinating world of Indian temple architecture and Hindu iconography. Her art finds increasing resonance with esoteric Indian traditions like classical dance, music and tantra, which continue to take compelling visual forms — provocatively traversing the spectrum of the sensual to the sublime. She formally trained in fine arts, earning an M.A. in Fine Arts specialising in textile design from Stella Maris College, Chennai, in 2004.
Presently, as a practising artist, her paintings are exhibited in art shows in India and abroad.
In her own words
I draw inspiration for my subject from the human form, its static and dynamic nature, in its purest self, devoid of a façade. My canvases are a struggle between reality and fantasy, perfect and flawed, classic and exotic — yet the opposites coexist, creating a visual drama almost in a state of flux.
My paintings are an exploration in line, colour, form and space, to find a balance and harmony between opposites. The majority of my work is oil on canvas, while I also explore other mediums like watercolour, colour pencils, charcoal and ink.
“I paint to find my safe space for existence.”
“Priya Ilango's art is influenced by her memories of small-town visits during her formative years. She vividly portrays the colours, the summers, the houses, and the conversations… a glimpse into the lives of women engrossed in conversations, oblivious to the world around them, as time stands still.”
— DT Next, on ‘Shades and Tints’
For acquisitions, commissions and exhibition enquiries — or simply to talk about the work. Paintings marked Available may be enquired about directly.
priya.ilango2009@gmail.com