Tejswini Narayan Sonawane, Drawing in Printmaking, presentation and workshop

Tejswini Narayan Sonawane is the Grand Prize recipient of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts and will have a solo show at the 36th Biennale edition in 2025.

Tejswini Narayan Sonawane is a printmaker whose works reveal personal stories, emotional states, relationship dynamics and transformation. She was born in 1987 in Solapur, India, where she works in her own studio, and is concerned with various art techniques such as woodcut, etching, drawing and watercolour. She completed an MFA in Printmaking in Mumbai in 2011, and has participated in more than 40 solo and group exhibitions. She has received numerous awards, scholarships and residencies, and regularly gives workshops in India and abroad.

In her talk and workshop presentation as part of From Biennale to Biennale, Tejswini touches on Indian printmaking and presents her portfolio, focusing particularly on the importance of printmaking within the discipline of drawing.

Tejswini Narayan Sonawane explains: "In art, there is a play of emotion and expression, and it is a direct-indirect, playful-serious process. We cannot count perfectly. In my drawings and prints, there is a combination, illusive overlapping of birds, animals and people. All the works smell the intensity of the urge on the surface, but unsaid from the core."

Tejswini's works speak loud and clear about our times and about our inner and outer struggles. "I have given expression to this often hidden situation or emotion of darkness that everyone has to deal with and it is not about a particular class but about the world – evolutionary and social," she says.

Photo: Urška Boljkovac. MGLC Archive.