Gallery FPH: Mamta Chitnis Sen's 'Rural Delights' Brings The Vanishing Beauty Of Konkan To Mumbai

Artist Mamta Chitnis Sen’s solo exhibition ‘Rural Delights’ brings the landscapes and lives of Konkan to Mumbai through vibrant acrylic paintings. Inspired by Sindhudurg, the exhibition focuses on rural communities, women farmers and changing landscapes. Using palette-knife techniques, Sen creates works that celebrate the region while documenting a way of life increasingly shaped by urbanisation.

What happens when a landscape is changing faster than memories can keep up? Artist and writer Mamta Chitnis Sen explores that question through ‘Rural Delights’, a vibrant new exhibition that turns the Konkan region into a world of colour, people and lived memories.

Presented at Gallery FPH, Mumbai, the solo exhibition runs from August 16 to August 30, 2026, and draws inspiration from the villages, landscapes and communities of Sindhudurg district in Maharashtra's Konkan region.

Bringing Konkan’s rural life to canvas

Rather than treating the countryside as a postcard-perfect setting, Sen looks at the Konkan through the people who live and work there. Her acrylic paintings explore the relationship between rural communities and the land around them, particularly focusing on women farmers and their everyday lives.

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"The theme explores the vanishing landscapes and people of Sindhudurg district in Konkan region of Maharashtra,” Sen says.

The paintings capture women across different stages of life as they go about their daily routines in fields, work alongside others or pause for conversations. Around them are dense green landscapes, flowering trees and abundant vegetation that reflect the distinctive character of Konkan.

A world built with palette-knife strokes

Acrylic paint and the palette-knife technique give the works their distinctive visual language. Instead of smooth, delicate layers, Sen builds up surfaces through bold strokes and textured applications, allowing flowers, foliage, earth and human figures to almost rise from the canvas.

The saturated colours bring an immediate sense of energy and warmth to the paintings, even as the subject carries a more serious undertone—the gradual transformation of rural spaces under the pressure of urbanisation.

Women at the heart of exhibition

Female figures are central to Sen's artistic vocabulary. Works including ‘Kali in Rose Bushes’, 'Rukmini in Flora' and ‘My Land, My Life’ place women within dense natural surroundings.

Interestingly, many of these figures do not have conventional facial features. Instead, their anonymity gives them a wider symbolic identity. They represent women whose lives, labour and memories are deeply connected to the soil and seasons of the region.

Sen's own background as a writer and artist informs this documentary quality. Having worked with leading Indian news houses and agencies for nearly two decades, she has also used her creative practice to engage with social realities, including the lives of women farmers.

With ‘Rural Delights’, the artist celebrates Konkan's beauty while quietly recording a landscape at a crossroads, inviting viewers to appreciate not only what exists today, but also what could disappear tomorrow.

Other details:

Where: Gallery FPH, Free Press House, Nariman Point, Mumbai

When: August 16 to August 30, 2026

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