"PRESSURE GRADIENT" RAGINI BHOW: Brussels

 

Pressure Gradient is Ragini Bhow’s first solo exhibition in Europe. At Stems Gallery in Brussels, her work locates itself across aluminum sculptures and carefully dotted paintings. Bhow’s practice acts as a system without containment. Each work captures–momentarily–different kinds of beings: breath, wood as flesh, tree-memory held in its grain. With the awareness that every entity absorbs and releases charged particles, one must meet the artist’s work.

 

Bhow’s two Vedi sculptures, named after the Sanskrit word for altar, emerged through cycles of casting and combustion. Drawn, 3D printed, hand-carved, and then dipped in ceramic, their coatings became temporary shells akin to insect exoskeletons or the outer wall of a womb-like kiln. After wax melts away, orifices resembling the empty spaces in Indus Valley petroglyphs become entry points for metal to find edges. Finally, fire passes over, blackening, to begin it all again. Born from the same heat as infinity’s stories, Bhow’s sculptures are birthings and rebirths, remnants and remains. Her practice is an invocation to a process she has lived—like when she watched the behavior of a flame in Rajasthan. She listened to the marks left on the clay as soot, which carried echoes of the chulhas, fire altars made to nourish and receive transformations. Attentively, Bhow watches for synchronicities.

 

Spiders know. One quiet architect threading space together.

 

Through the language of tension, of webs and bodies, of fine lines between life and decay, Bhow’s works are as much unseen as felt. The clash of black ash, iron oxide, selenite white, and cobalt is fusion. Indigo heated with clay becomes Maya blue. Well before they are mixed and take form on Bhow’s pictorial surfaces, her pigments hold energy. Seeing them once is not seeing them.

 

Like an 8-eyed web-making arachnid pulling forms into orbit, Bhow’s wall works move. Rhythmically, precisely, symmetry is not just a compositional choice but an alchemical alignment. Pressure gradients. Breathy oscillations. The symmetry mirrors planetary geometries where gaping holes punctuate the plane not as voids but thresholds. Two paintings, Dilation and Cat Eye, introduce spaces between horizon fields that frame a kind of staring out, where you no longer see where things begin or end. Bhow’s works flicker between dimensional registers, so gravity wells and elsewheres fold onto birch.

 

Before the word, before the measure, there was the pulse. And long before extraction and the market, there were those who listened. Endlessly.

 

Indigenous cosmologies understand that material is never inert. Material is history, and it is motion. The charge in a storm and the hum in stone are not metaphors but forces. When the world breaks itself open in fire, flood, and fracture, attuning to these energies is not just an aesthetic exercise, not just poetic—it is survival.

 

The artist dreams of climbing a tree.

 

Pressure Gradient’s works are living entities, records of time’s slow movement and portals into collapse. To look closely is to fall in. The work is an offering—something once forgotten, now surfacing. To see Bhow’s works is to watch them breathe.

 

(Written by Lekha Jandhyala)