British Museum Artist Brings Surrealist Painting to Mumbai — For the First Time
Meso Ventures presents The Mythologies of Colour — four London-based painters at Soho House Mumbai | Brings British Museum-collected painter Jessie Makinson to India for the first time, alongside Mohini Kaur, Parnika Mittal, and Mary Pye.
Opening: 30 April 2026, 5:00 pm onwards | On View: 30 April – 17 May 2026 | Soho House Mumbai, Juhu Beach
As surrealism dominates the global art conversation, Meso Ventures brings British Museum-collected painter Jessie Makinson to India for the first time — alongside three painters whose practices weave myth, ritual, and ancestral memory through colour. The Mythologies of Colour opens 30 April 2026 at Soho House Mumbai, with works on view through 17 May 2026.
Framed by the shifting light of Juhu Beach and the vast horizon of the Arabian Sea, the exhibition unites the distinct painterly voices of Jessie Makinson (b. 1985, London), Mohini Kaur (b. 1994, London/Pune), Parnika Mittal (b. 1993, Delhi/London), and Mary Pye (b. 2001, London). Across four practices, colour becomes a means of articulating what resists fixed form — the felt, the remembered, and the imagined.
The Mythologies of Colour explores colour not merely as visual phenomenon but as a language — one capable of holding the weight of cultural inheritance, personal displacement, ancestral memory, and spiritual inquiry. The exhibition positions these four painters in dialogue, tracing the overlapping and divergent ways in which colour is used to give form to experience that exceeds language.
About the Artists
Jessie Makinson | British Museum, London · Hessel Museum, New York · Long Museum, Shanghai
Jessie Makinson’s intricately painted, folklore-inflected scenes fuse historical and imagined worlds — drawing together 18th-century brothel imagery, Georgian parlour games, and contemporary eco sci-fi into unstable, funhouse-mirror compositions. Her work holds mythology and portraiture in a state of continual, irreverent transformation. This is her first exhibition in India.
Makinson studied at the Royal Drawing School, completing The Drawing Year postgraduate programme in 2013, and holds a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art (2007). Her work is held in the collections of the British Museum, London; the Hessel Museum, New York; and the Long Museum, Shanghai.
Mohini Kaur | MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London (2025)
Mohini Kaur’s paintings turn to elemental motifs and ancestral interiority. Working with ritual materials — kumkum, ash, charcoal, and salt — she explores how transcendence is felt and resisted in the body. Her KALI series (2026) presents layered surfaces of deep red that invoke the goddess’s dual nature — creation and destruction, devotion and fierce power — through pigment, mark, and accumulated material presence.
Kaur completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 2025, having previously earned a BA in French and Philosophy from King’s College London (2017). Her practice moves across painting, installation, sculpture, and photography. Recent exhibitions include The Diasporic Archive at The Old Waiting Room and Ancestral Utopias at The Hangar RCA, London (2025). Her work has been featured in Uncommon Images (Ahmedabad) and Docu Magazine (London).
Parnika Mittal | Tate Modern Exchange Programme · La Louvière Museum Collection, Brussels
Parnika Mittal’s fractured abstractions carry the emotional residue of movement, uncertainty, and the instability of home. Drawing on personal journals and lived transitions between Delhi and London, her paintings dissolve recognisable figures and spaces into shifting patterns, textures, and traces of feeling. Her work holds memory, loss, and identity in states of continual transformation.
Mittal holds an MA in Painting from Central Saint Martins, London (2019), and a BFA from the College of Art, New Delhi (2016). Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tate Modern Tate Exchange Associates programme, and is held in the collection of the La Louvière Museum, Brussels. In 2017 she was nominated for the title of Promising State Artist in India.
Mary Pye | AdP Museum of Art, Ahmedabad · Nikolas Tsalamanios Collection, Athens
Mary Pye’s meditative, process-led paintings reveal colour through stillness, light, and time. Working through a slow rhythm of deposition and erosion — laying down pigment, shifting it, withdrawing it, and allowing it to settle — each canvas becomes a form of quiet listening. Her works invite an attentiveness that mirrors the contemplative nature of the paintings themselves.
Pye completed a BA in Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2025. Her work has been exhibited across India and the UK, including Gesture of Memories at Meso Ventures, New Delhi (2026), and Into the Future, presented by Bulgari and Meso Ventures in Mayfair, London (2025). Her work is held in the AdP Museum of Art, Ahmedabad, and the Nikolas Tsalamanios Collection, Athens.
Exhibition Details
Exhibition: The Mythologies of Colour
Artists: Jessie Makinson, Mohini Kaur, Parnika Mittal, Mary Pye
Presented by: Meso Ventures
Venue: Soho House Mumbai, Juhu Beach, Mumbai, India
Opening Night: Wednesday, 30 April 2026, 5:00 pm onwards
On View: 30 April – 17 May 2026
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About Meso Ventures
Meso Ventures is an international art platform dedicated to fostering cross-cultural exchange through curated exhibitions and artist development. Working across London, Delhi, Mumbai, and beyond, Meso Ventures brings together emerging and established artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, installation, and photography.