Collection: Maanu

Artist - Kumar Misal
Painting on recycled tea bags over handmade pulp

Maanu // माणु  — meaning “human” in Pahadi — operates as a study of presence, using portraiture as both record and ritual. This small series by Kumar Misal, maps the human as an essential element of the mountainous landscape. Through stripped-down figuration and compressed palettes, the works retain a stark directness and serve as vessels of cultural resonance. Clothing patterns, facial lines, and postures become topographies, offering readings of lived history and ecology. The juxtapositions within the series — figure and ground, stain and line, fragility and permanence — stage a dialogue between the individual and the collective, between the transient and the enduring.

The use of everyday material becomes both formal and political, insisting that the very stuff of daily life is worthy of representation, that the ordinary is sacred. Kumar is inviting invocations in these works. He calls forth the human not as a mere inhabitant of the hills, but as its very pulse — as the rhythm through which the place breathes. Each work, in its modest scale and raw tactility, becomes an artefact of belonging, a reminder of identity is constructed from touch, gesture, and the quiet accumulation that mountain life is.