Opening Reception | Raghav Babbar: My Mother Tongue is Paint

Opening Reception | Raghav Babbar: My Mother Tongue is Paint

Thur. December 11 | 5 - 8 PM

RSVP is required.

CICA Circle Member gets one free drink. Please show reception your valid Membership Card upon check-in.

Come join us for the opening reception of Raghav Babbar's solo exhibition My Mother Tongue is Paint, whose contemplative portraits explore intimacy, migration, and the quiet language of human connection.

The exhibition foregrounds the artist’s lived experience as a migrant navigating the emotional terrain between India and the UK, and the quiet communities of kinship formed in that space in-between.

Having moved from India to London, Babbar paints the people who surround him, friends, fellow artists, and those who anchor him in a new cultural landscape. His portraits, executed in oil with slow deliberation and layered texture, record the time and intimacy shared between painter and sitter. The act of painting becomes an act of translation: of feeling into form, of friendship into colour, of life into gesture.

In this exhibition, Babbar presents a series of recent paintings and oil studies, many of which began as encounters in London’s Battersea Park, a recurring space of reflection and grounding in his work. Located on the south bank of the River Thames, Battersea Park is a historical landscape of crossings: a Victorian pleasure ground, a site of wartime shelter, and now a gathering place for diverse diasporic communities. These portraits, often set against understated or unfinished grounds, highlight the conversation between materiality and emotion that defines Babbar’s practice. His restrained palette, cool greys, muted blues, and earth tones, carries the soft light of London, while traces of the saturated warmth of India remain beneath the surface.

About the Artist

Raghav Babbar (b. 1997, Rohtak near Delhi, India) lives and works in London. He studied at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore, and the Royal College of Art, London. His studio practice continues the lineage of modern and contemporary portraiture while grounding it in a personal sensibility shaped by migration, friendship, and a devotion to the tactile life of paint.

Babbar’s work has been the subject of the monograph Raghav Babbar: Indian Summer, published by Hurtwood Contemporary, and featured in numerous exhibitions internationally, including Raghav Babbar: Layers of Life at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice (2023). My Mother Tongue is Paint marks his first solo exhibition in Canada.