Pichwai, a 400-year-old temple art from Nathdwara, travels from its sacred cloth backdrops to a global spotlight in Venice. Curator and collector Pooja Singhal leads an atelier of hereditary and miniature-trained artists, redrawing traditional temple maps to chart Venice’s canals and skyline while preserving the form’s rigorous visual grammar, devotional intensity, and collective authorship for contemporary audiences.
Pichwai is a 400-year-old temple art form from Nathdwara, Rajasthan — painted on cloth, hung behind the idol of Shrinathji, and built through a visual system that holds temple ritual, sacred geography, and devotional narrative. For most of its history, it has been made by hereditary artists for temples and collectors who understood its world. This year, it arrives in Venice.
From India, to Venice is a satellite exhibition coinciding with La Biennale di Venezia, which opened at Palazzo Barbaro on May 6. At its centre are 10 large-scale temple maps — a genre that was once used to chart the sacred geography of Nathdwara — redrawn to hold the canals, bridges, and skyline of Venice. Alongside them, Khakha works, the preparatory line-drawings traditionally kept behind the scenes, are presented as finished pieces, some in dialogue with Canaletto, whose architectural precision finds an unexpected counterpart in the Pichvai Tradition and Beyond atelier’s practice.
The exhibition is the work of Pooja Singhal — collector, curator, and atelier founder — who expanded art's language into new formats and geographies. Developed with curators Elizabeth Royer and Michele Codoni, it follows a landmark 2025 show at London's Mall Galleries. Venice is the next step, and a considerably more scrutinised one.
We spoke to Singhal ahead of the opening.
Pooja Singhal: The strength of Pichwai lies in its internal structure — a discipline of organising space, movement, and narrative through a specific visual logic. Once that becomes clear, the question shifts from what you are showing to how you are seeing it.
Mapping Venice came from that understanding. The grammar remains intact: the density of detail, the layering, the way space is held within the frame. Even the palette is not imported but drawn from within the tradition, re-scaled and re-balanced to respond to a different light, a different landscape. The soul of the practice sits in that rigour. As long as that is not compromised, the form can move across geographies without becoming superficial.
PS: It brought the act of drawing back into focus. In Pichwai, the Khakha has traditionally been a preparatory stage. It sits behind the final work, guiding scale, proportion, and placement, but is rarely presented on its own. While preparing for Venice, I was looking closely at Italian painters to understand how the city had been observed and constructed historically. That is where Canaletto came in. His work carries a very particular precision, where line is used to measure, record, and build the city with consistency and control.
When we began working through this alongside the Khakha method, something shifted. The line in Khakha carries both the discipline of the atelier and a direct engagement with the city being studied. The works begin to sit between sketch and finished painting. What comes forward is the structure of how an entire image is constructed.
PS: We do not position it as anonymous. We position it as a system of knowledge, based on the actual guru-shishya tradition of the Pichwai art form, where the work has always been built collectively. What you are seeing is the outcome of a shared language that has been refined over generations, with a level of control that comes from continuity of practice.
At the same time, the atelier is not limited to one lineage. We have also brought in artists trained in other schools, particularly from the miniature tradition, and placed them within this system. They bring a different sensitivity to line and composition, and that exchange has been important in how the work develops. For a global audience, it shifts the way value is understood. The work is about a lineage that continues to produce with depth and control.
PS: London was about scale and introduction. It was the first time Pichwai had been presented at that scale and in those formats, allowing people to enter the world of the tradition beyond its usual context.
Venice is entirely different. The audience arrives with a certain level of exposure and expectation, and the work has to hold itself within that environment without explanation. This presentation is more focused — built around one idea taken deeper: The temple maps, the drawing practice, the dialogue with Canaletto, and how that language extends into a new geography. It also needs to sit comfortably within the larger conversation around contemporary art, as a working visual system that can stand alongside other practices.
PS: I think it happened when I realised that what felt ordinary to me was actually highly technical, and increasingly fragile. Growing up in Udaipur, Pichwai paintings were always around me. My mother collected traditional works; artists would come home, and trips to Nathdwara were routine.
The shift came through sustained time with the artists — understanding the complexity embedded in the practice: the colour systems, the drawing discipline, the way architecture, textiles, ritual, and narrative are held within a single visual language. These traditions were disappearing from cultural visibility. Familiarity became a point of view. I began to see Pichwai as something that needed repositioning — structurally, visually, culturally — for a different generation and a different audience.
PS: I don't see it as secularising the form. The devotional aspect of Pichwai sits in the act of looking — the patience of construction, the discipline of observation, the attention given to detail. Traditionally, temple maps traced movement through space: how town life organised itself around the haveli, how ritual, procession, and daily life coexisted. Mapping Venice asked whether that same system of seeing could hold another city with equal intensity. Venice has its own rhythms — water, congregation, spectacle, history. The work is about what sustained attention does to the experience of a place.
PS: I think Pichwai can take that pressure because it was never entirely static to begin with. If you look closely at the tradition over centuries, the works were always responding to changing seasons, patronage, textiles, architecture, and devotional contexts. The temple cycles themselves required constant variation: Festivals, rituals, times of day, seasonal shifts all changed the imagery, colour palettes, attire, and atmosphere of the works. There was already movement within the practice.
What often happens with revival is that a tradition gets reduced to a fixed image of itself. The intention at the atelier has been to extend the language from within the structure of the practice, without breaking its internal logic. Of course, there have been moments where we have had to rethink direction. But that is part of the process.
PS: I never approached the atelier as a conventional luxury business. It was built as a revival-led initiative first — structured as a company for practical reasons, but always oriented toward the long-term continuity of the practice. Everything generated goes back into training younger artists, sustaining senior practitioners, and the research and time required to produce work at this level.
Conviction alone isn't enough forever. The model has to build its own audience. That's why expanding the language of Pichwai and placing it within global contemporary contexts matters — if the work remains culturally relevant, the ecosystem around it strengthens. The focus has always been on allowing the practice to survive with integrity while it evolves.