Mysuru-based artist NS Harsha is known for his paintings on canvas and built surfaces as well as for his site-specific installations, community-based art and sculptural work. He draws on a range of idioms — from traditional miniatures, folk and popular art, textbook illustrations and classical Western painting — to produce witty, satirical and absurdist visual narratives. He completed a BFA in painting at the Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (CAVA) in Mysuru in 1992, followed by an MFA from MS University, Baroda, in 1995, where he was mentored by Nilima Sheikh.

Harsha is best known for his paintings characterised by delicate and detailed figures rendered with fine brushwork in flat colours and singular pictorial planes. His works are philosophical and political reflections on the impact of globalisation, current affairs and geopolitical forces in local and vernacular contexts. Harsha also explores the tensions between the individual and the collective, especially in his monumental narrative-figural paintings that consist of vast areas of flat space populated by a multitude of highly individualised, colourful figures.

In his early works, such as the triptych We Come, We Eat and We Sleep (1991–2001), he observes the individual within contemporary Indian society, who has a shared experience in performing everyday, essential human activities in combinations that are as numerous as there are individuals. Harsha’s preoccupation with the individual manifests in several of his subsequent works, where individual identities, however distinct, morph into typologies such as the child, the sleeping figure, the suited businessman, the rural farmer and the wise or foolish clown, forming a repertoire of characters that emerge and transform through many subsequent works. Since the 2000s, Harsha’s works have borne the hallmark of repeated human figures, each depicted as a different individual — a possible reference to the schema of Indian sculptural traditions. This trait features prominently in works like Mass Marriage (2003), in which hundreds of couples appear to exchange vows as if on a conveyor belt. The painting was inspired by an advertisement in a local newspaper that promised an affordable, value-for-money ritual. Absurdity ensues, as a groom in drunken stupor, a bride married to a dog, garlanded photographs and even two donkeys marry alongside more conventional couples, against fake scenic backdrops of the various “Wonders of the World”. He parodies the ‘Indian wedding’ that commodifies tradition while also depicting the aspirations of the middle-class, their conventions and superstitions.