The upcoming solo exhibition of Kalpana Shah at Tao Art Gallery, The Shapes of Elsewhere, unfolds through three chapters of the artist's practice, each celebrating Shah's pictorial vocabulary of repeated gestures and patient accumulation while expanding the possibilities of painting. Rather than tracing a linear passage from figuration to abstraction, the exhibition reveals a practice in continuous transformation, where architecture gradually dissolves into rhythm, layered marks oscillate between landscape and abstraction, and painting ultimately extends into space itself. Drawing on Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, the exhibition approaches the house not simply as a physical structure but as a site of intimacy, memory and daydream. Shah's reimagined dwellings carry that same inwardness. Familiar yet unplaceable, they invite viewers to project their own remembered spaces onto them before gradually loosening their hold on representation. As architecture dissolves into rhythmic fields of colour and gesture, painting becomes a space where memory, perception and imagination quietly converge. Across paintings and installations, The Shapes of Elsewhere reflects on the ways we inhabit places long after we have left them. Moving between the intimate and the cosmic, the exhibition suggests that the shapes we carry within us are formed less by architecture than by memory, reverie and imagination.

Curated by Arnaud Morand