Working intuitively, Soumya Netrabile channels her subconscious to mining memories of walking through nature to create her paintings. Her canvases comprise atmospheric fields of majestic color. Forests of green, amber, and peach—occasional animals or figures appear—dwarfed by swirling flame-esque brushstrokes. Netrabile dissolves real space into lyrical abstraction, uncovering poetic and spiritual connections to landscape and the world surrounding us.
Soumya Netrabile (b. 1966, Bangalore, India) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rutgers University. Recent solo exhibitions include Pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA; Andrew Rafacz, Chicago, IL; and The Journal, New York, NY. Netrabile has exhibited in group exhibitions at galleries including Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Rachel Uffner, New York, NY; Trinta Gallery, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Indigo + Madder, London, UK; and Karma, New York, NY. The artist lives and works in Chicago, IL.
"The Anat Ebgi show is about how walking leads to reverie. The paintings are explorations of how the physical act of wandering is tied to the mental activity of wandering... I think most of the Anat Ebgi show was painted while listening to opera." —Soumya Netrabile
Earthly Pleasures: A Review of Soumya Netrabile’s Searching for Stars
In viewing Netrabile’s canvases, it feels as though we are forced to have this roving eye, to journey through the work. The motion of each work takes you in like a riptide, impossible to break away once you begin to follow the urgency of the brushstroke, the flow of Netrabile’s hand. —Annie Dauber
What artists are really doing when they take up residencies
‘This is my first residency ever,’ says one of this year’s artists, the Indian-born, Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist Soumya Netrabile. ‘I even came to my art career later in life because I had to put family first.’ Since the artist paints pieces that mediate between abstraction and representation, exploring how the body relates to natural terrain, the Tuscan forest surrounding the studios has been significant to her. —Christina Makris
Netrabile’s feature takes the viewer through the looking glass in a beautiful and lusciously brushed display of immersive landscapes. With painterly touches that echo Monet to Gorky, we see man not as the master of his world, but as an integral part of it. —Alan Pocaro
"My recent work is mainly semi-abstract and connected to my evolving relationship with the forest near my home. Over the last few years, I have been spending a lot of time inside a local forest preserve, observing and absorbing phenomenological experiences and studying the numerous relationships inside its ecosystem." —Soumya Netrabile
In Between the Greens: A Review of Soumya Netrabile at Andrew Rafacz
Viewing the exhibition, it becomes clear that Netrabile’s preoccupation with compositional structures and the movement of the gaze sits comfortably side by side with her careful study of color chemistry and the natural phenomenon of light. —Pia Singh
The Art of Soumya Netrabile, Lush, Apolitical, Ambiguous
Though bright reds and greens dominate in her recent works, each piece retains a unique sense of lucidity and motion through varying proportions of light and dark, the thickness of paint, and the continuity of brushstrokes. —Suzanna Murawski
"I try to switch up how I approach the canvas, just to keep myself excited and moving forward. One of my goals is to learn as much as I can about the medium and the surface, and what I can do with the surface." —Soumya Netrabile
"I take a walk in the woods everyday, look at the river, and try to slow down. A lot of these connections that I build with nature come out subconsciously when I'm drawing or painting." —Soumya Netrabile
Interview: Soumya Netrabile, A Contemporary Abstract Painter
With her ceramic sculptures, she takes recognizable, familiar forms and reinvents them to take on new identities. Soumya has always had a strong sense of herself as a maker and she can’t remember a time when she didn’t think of herself as an artist. —Marga Patterson
Soumya Netrabile paints exuberant landscapes throbbing with vegetal life. Her hallucinatory scenes, often bordering on the edge of abstraction, begin with an intense period of immersion in nature.
"Maybe an arm will turn into a flower petal, and it feels right for a moment so I leave it be. The next moment that petal changes into a uterus or an elephant head and so forth. I try hard not to judge whatever flows in and out." —Soumya Netrabile
"I’m currently working on paintings and sculptures that are informed by the body, both externally and internally. My process is basically intuitive, whether I’m working with clay or paint." —Soumya Netrabile
"A good part of my youth was a typical American immigrant experience. I had to learn to balance two cultural identities and work out a place for myself. Making art helped me through this." —Soumya Netrabile
Williamsburg Art & Historical Center | Soumya Netrabile
The gestural line drawings in her composition are beautiful and distinctive. The large blocks of color in her work are ambiguous yet very intentional and descriptive. Netribile leads the viewer with descriptive realistic gestures, leaving room for observation of her puzzling abstractions. —Audrey Meehan