Gaurang Naik

Gaurang Naik’s practice engages the material and psychological traces left behind by the encounter between human activity and the natural world. His works function as meditations on loss, transience, and transformation, examining how landscapes absorb the consequences of extraction, habitation, and time. Drawing from his experience of growing up in South Goa between the region’s iron ore mining belt and its historic settlements, Naik approaches the environment as a repository of accumulated histories, where textures, scars, dust, and residue register the continual negotiation between permanence and decay.

Working across painting and sculpture, Naik extends the conventions of still life beyond the depiction of objects to consider their capacity as carriers of memory. Ancestral artefacts, found objects, and fragments of material culture recur throughout his practice, functioning as portals through which personal and collective histories are accessed. Through processes of observation and accumulation, he constructs visual fields where objects, surfaces, and remnants become evidence of lived experience. His work foregrounds the afterlives of things, exploring how memory persists through material form even as it undergoes transformation.

Naik completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Goa College of Art in 2019 and his Master of Visual Arts in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in 2021. He has participated in IMMERSE 3.0 Residency and Fellowship for Emerging Indian Artists at Somaiya Vidyavihar University (2024), the SAIL Mentorship Programme for Creative Practitioners at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts (2022), and the Students’ Biennale Workshop Unmaking Conventions: Location as Resource led by Sanchayan Ghosh (2021). His work has been presented at Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts; India Art Fair, New Delhi (2022); HH Art Spaces, Goa (2022–23); the 102nd Annual Exhibition of The Art Society of India, Mumbai (2020); and Into the Vault with the Goa Artists Collective at the Museum of Goa (2019). He is the recipient of the Late Milind Madhukar Bhade Gold Medal, Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU Baroda (2022), the Batch of 1990 Award for Best Work, Goa College of Art (2019), the Late Hanumant B. Neugi Memorial Prize at the 44th State Art Exhibition, Kala Academy, Goa (2019), and First Prize at the 43rd State Art Exhibition, Kala Academy, Goa (2018).

Naik lives and works in Goa, India