Ashima Dhir Sehgal (ADS) is an artist of fierce sensitivity and quiet power. Her multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, ceramics, and photography—but beyond mediums, it is rooted in emotional truth. She doesn't create to impress. She creates to witness. To hold space for what we bury. To honour the weight of silence in a world obsessed with noise.
Ashima began her professional life in courtrooms, trained in law, where language was sharp and precise. But over time, she stepped away from arguments and into abstraction. A self-taught artist, her transition wasn’t a detour but a deeper calling—to make room for emotion that couldn’t be spoken. The discipline remains, but now it serves feeling, not fact.
Her work is a meditative response to the chaos around us. She paints not from theory, but from instinct. There’s a stillness in her forms—a kind of soft resistance. She calls herself “a translator of inner worlds.” Her figures don’t perform. They endure. They don’t seek your gaze—they meet it.
Her latest body of work, Stoic Silences, explores this further. Set against the backdrop of breathless cities, it delves into the invisible architecture of stillness. These aren’t romantic silences—they are lived ones. Her female figures carry their truths not in expression, but in presence. The palette is stripped down—greys, burnt oranges, bruised ivories, rusted reds. These are not colours that shout; they whisper, they witness, they wait.
Ashima draws from Cubism, abstraction, and storytelling traditions across cultures. But her greatest inspiration remains women—not as muses, but as maps of resilience and remembering. “I don’t paint idealism,” she says. “I paint what a woman holds back after the world stops looking.”
Her work has been shown in exhibitions across India, Indonesia, Paris, and the Philippines, and lives in private and institutional collections including Museum Pasifika, the Council General of India (Bali), and London’s Underground at Oxford Circus and Leicester Square. She has received awards such as India’s Artistic Vanguard: Top Talent of 2024, the EWAA Emerging Women Artists Award, the International Brooklyn Art Prize, and the Rising Star accolade from City Art Factory. Still, she does not measure her success in accolades. “When someone stands in front of my painting and feels seen—that is the award.”
Ashima’s vision is clear and quiet: to create art that listens, not lectures. To honour what goes unsaid. And to remind us that silence isn’t the absence of story—it is the story.