Artists: Martand Khosla - Saad Qureshi

Nature Morte presents To Build and Remember, the first exhibition to bring together the practices of Martand Khosla and Saad Qureshi.

Architecture promises shelter, belonging, permanence. It rarely delivers all three. Both artists locate their practice in the gap between that promise and its failure: Khosla from inside the discipline, as a trained architect with decades of work in India's rapidly transforming cities; Qureshi from the position of a sculptor, bringing to architectural form the material intelligence and spatial rigour of a different training entirely. The gap, for both, is where their works begin.

Both propose the void as essential. In his sculptures, Khosla makes the absence the purpose of the work: a large circular wall relief constructed of hundreds of individually cut architectural elements which orbit an empty centre, and flat panels that render invisible forces as raw energy. In Qureshi's sculptures, the destination is always the void, portable landscapes built to travel nowhere. Qureshi's large-scale landscapes made from wood ash, black sand, and charcoal hang alongside carbon paper drawings and laser-etched surfaces: a world built entirely from the residue of making and unmaking.

Neither artist works with materials typical to the fine arts. Khosla etches into intumescent paint, a coating engineered to resist destruction, burning through protection to reveal the architectural blueprints beneath. Qureshi reverses the function of carbon paper, scratching images out of darkness rather than pressing them in. The process that follows is the same for both: subtraction. Both artists arrive at this conclusion through different means, but the logic is shared. The image lives in what has been taken away. The drawing is an absence. The mark is a scar.

Both artists keep asking the same questions through each material decision, every new form, every experiment with process. For Khosla, cities are sites of relentless construction and destruction, their forms accelerating beyond the human capacity to understand or control them. For Qureshi, what endures is not the structure but the liminal space it leaves behind in memory: the feeling of a place after it is gone. That longing, both practices suggest, is not loss. Together they bear witness: to what the built world promises, to what it destroys in the circumstances of making, and to everything that persists in the space between the two.

Saad Qureshi (b. 1986, Bewal, Pakistan) lives and works between London and Oxford. He received his BA in Fine Art from Oxford Brookes University and his MFA in Painting from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Working across sculpture, drawing and textile, his practice explores memory, landscape and the psychological experience of cultural belonging. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Nature Morte New Delhi, Aicon Gallery New York and Gazelli Art House London. His work is held in numerous public and private collections, and he has received the Royal British Society of Sculptors Bursary Award, the Celeste Prize and the Red Mansion Foundation Prize. He has been a trustee of Yorkshire Sculpture Park since 2021.

Martand Khosla (b. 1975, New Delhi, India) lives and works in New Delhi. He received his architectural diploma from the Architectural Association, London, and is the principal architect of Romi Khosla Design Studios, an architecture practice with over four decades of work around the world. His art practice, developed alongside his architecture since the early 2000s, explores urban continuity and transformation through sculpture, installation and two-dimensional works. Solo exhibitions of his works have been mounted by Nature Morte in New Delhi and Mumbai (2012, 2016, 2019, 2022, 2025). Group exhibitions he has participated in include State of Architecture, National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai (2016); 50 Years After 50 Years of the Bauhaus 1968, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2018); and Food, SESC, São Paulo (2014). Most recently, Khosla completed the Lawh wa Qalam: M.F. Husain Museum, in Doha (2025), commissioned by the Qatar Foundation.