Artist Profile Yashica Dhabre

Dhabre’s contemplative, intelligently painted panels unfold plywood grain into living language.

Artist Statement

Untitled is an interactive installation composed of oil-painted plywood panels joined with metal hinges and clasps. The piece performs an illusion of continuity—its imagery unfolds and retracts as the panels are opened and closed by the viewer. Each side of every panel is painted in careful dialogue with the grain of the wood, weaving the smallest and largest movements of the surface into the composition. The work blurs boundaries between painting, object, and space—inviting the viewer’s body to activate it through movement. It enacts a meditation on surface as both origin and residue of meaning, where the plywood’s industrial transformation speaks to the larger paradox of how materials evolve, endure, and return.

My work explores painting as invention—rooted in the belief that painting is one of the first formal languages of the human species. Through this lens, I engage with plywood as a contemporary surface that holds within it layered histories of nature, industry, and human intervention. The process is slow and recursive, following the grain of the material itself: what I call tree-ness—the life, transformation, and afterlife of the tree within its industrial form. By weaving translucencies of paint through this surface, I consider how objects store human memory, how time accumulates on and within matter, and how painting can extend language beyond the written or spoken word—into rhythm, form, and illusion.

Artist Biography

Yashica Dhabre is an Indian visual artist whose work bridges painting, material inquiry, and philosophical thought. Through a meticulous, slow process of drybrush painting, she investigates the layered relationships between human invention, material transformation, and the passage of time. She has exhibited internationally, with recent shows including Chromafugue (The Peale Museum, Baltimore, 2025), Dialogues of the Diaspora (Embassy Marriott, Washington D.C., 2025), Hopscotch (Baltimore Innovation Center, 2025), and Unlock-2021 (Nehru Centre Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2021). She was also a finalist in the 2025 Be Still Media Prompt 25 International Art Competition. Dhabre holds an MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Bachelor of Design from the National Institute of Fashion Technology, India. Her work reflects a deep engagement with both historical and contemporary ideas of painting as an evolving language. She currently lives and works between Baltimore and India.