Nature Morte is pleased to present Ragini Bhow’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery, bringing together a new body of drawings, paintings and sculptures, that considers matter, transformation and the conditions through which form becomes perceptible.

The exhibition takes its title from a botanical phenomenon known as bolting, in which plants, often in response to extreme conditions, prematurely flower and redirect their remaining energy towards producing seeds. Bhow first encountered the phenomenon in her rooftop garden during a heat wave. The sudden flowering of the plants became a point of departure for thinking about adaptation, urgency and self-preservation, and led her to consider the flower not simply as an image of growth, but as a response to changing conditions.

These ideas take shape most directly in Bhow’s paintings on wood, where botanical and geometric forms are rendered through thousands of tiny, individual marks. Built slowly through repetition and accumulation, the works operate between the microscopic and the expansive, evoking cellular structures, patterns of growth and processes of multiplication. Bhow often produces her own pigments, including colours made from minerals and ash, allowing the materials themselves to become part of the work’s history. 

Sculptures in cast aluminium and cast bronze introduce another form of transformation. Bhow uses fire from within, causing the surfaces to burn away and collapse into a powdery black residue. The ash is then collected and returned to the paintings as pigment. Across these processes, destruction becomes a form of making: stone is ground into colour, wood retains traces of growth, and ash carries the physical memory of fire.

Rooted in the artist’s engagement with indigenous knowledge systems and non-Western traditions of image-making, Bolting moves between botanical, microbial, anatomical and planetary scales. Rather than treating materials as passive mediums, Bhow approaches them as active carriers of geological and ecological memory, inviting viewers to recalibrate their attention and look more closely at the densities and structures that constitute the world around us.