(June in London , 2024-2025, Oil on canvas. 127 x 203 cm. Image courtesy of Lysias Arts Management)
CICA Vancouver is pleased to present My Mother Tongue is Paint, a solo exhibition by Raghav Babbar, whose contemplative portraits explore intimacy, migration, and the quiet language of human connection.
For Babbar, painting is not merely a form of representation but a way of speaking — a language of belonging. My Mother Tongue is Paint reflects the artist’s ongoing dialogue between the East and the West, between silence and expression, between self and other. 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.
“My mother tongue is paint,” Babbar writes. “It is how I know myself, how I speak to the world.”
Through his brush, emotion takes physical form, the density of paint mirroring the depth of connection. His portraits hold vulnerability and stillness, inviting viewers into that fragile space where looking becomes a form of empathy.
My Mother Tongue is Paint marks Babbar’s first solo exhibition in Canada.
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.
