Latika Katt used to say that sculpture becomes a companion, that an idea forms slowly in the mind until it takes shape in something you can finally touch, something you can hug. She spent six decades chasing that feeling: an abstract, uncatchable thought turning into stone and bronze you could hold in your arms. Now, for the first time, it’s her absence we’re being asked to hold. Abandoned is the last series she ever made, and it’s on view at Gallery Threshold in New Delhi as the final chapter of a life spent refusing to be told what a sculptor, or a woman, could or could not do.
Tucked into a home in Sarvodaya Enclave, Gallery Threshold is presenting Abandoned, sculptor Latika Katt’s final series, shown alongside a selection of her graphite drawings. Curated by Tunty Chauhan, the exhibition is on till 12 September, open Monday to Saturday from 11am to 7pm, and by appointment on Sundays. It isn’t a retrospective in the traditional sense. It’s closer to a closing statement, the last thing an artist had to say, left for the rest of us to sit with.
To understand Abandoned, you have to understand Latika Katt. She was never interested in working within limits, least of all the ones placed on her. She cast her own bronze. She carved her own stone. In a discipline that has long demanded physical force and technical mastery, she did the demanding work herself, refusing to hand it off to assistants or foundries.
Her training took her from Banaras Hindu University to MS University Baroda, and eventually to London’s Slade School of Art. Along the way, she earned the Lalit Kala Akademi National Award and built an exhibition history that reads like a map of the art world: Paris, Moscow, Chicago, Osaka, Beijing. But for all that international reach, her work never lost its rootedness. It stayed tethered to something more personal, more local, more hers.
The Abandoned series is built around three ideas that show up again and again in Katt’s late work: decay, growth, and erosion. Look closely at these pieces and you’ll see forms that resemble archaeological finds, or fragments of architecture that time has half erased. There’s a sense of things being uncovered rather than made, as if the sculptures already existed somewhere, buried, and Katt simply excavated them.
She was a lifelong student of the human form, and her two enduring muses, the city of Varanasi and the natural world, run through this series like a current. This wasn’t work made at a comfortable distance from mortality. It was completed at the very end of her life, which gives every piece in the show a particular kind of weight. You’re not just looking at sculpture. You’re looking at someone’s final reckoning with the questions that shaped her entire career.
The making of each piece follows a process as considered as its meaning. It begins as bronze, cast from wax maquettes Katt shaped with her own hands. That bronze is then mounted within hand carved stone, not attached, but set, the way a relic is placed into a reliquary built to hold it.
Katt herself put it best: “When others cast for you, you are limited,” she said. “I have no limits.” That refusal to delegate is exactly what gives these works their charge. The bronze and stone don’t just sit together, they settle into what she called an unexpected accord, two materials with entirely different natures finding a way to belong to each other.
Walk through the show and you’ll find thirteen bronze and stone sculptures forming the core of the exhibition, alongside a suspended metal work that greets visitors right at the entrance. There are terracotta pieces that echo the architecture of termite mounds, and wood and copper sculptures hung from the ceiling, defying the usual gravity of stone and bronze.
On the walls, a quieter register: graphite drawings that reveal a gentler, more private side of Katt’s practice. And running through the preview, a short film, a reminder that this exhibition isn’t just an inventory of objects, but a portrait of a person.
That portrait comes into sharpest focus in filmmaker Muzaffar Ali’s six minute film, made to explore Katt’s lifelong bond with Varanasi, the city of her birth. Ali described her ghat inspired sculptures as pieces “designed to receive light in different ways,” crediting her work with an architectural sensibility that went beyond conventional sculpture.
Curator Tunty Chauhan set out to do something similar with the exhibition as a whole, to represent Katt in full, holding her strength and her softness in the same room. The muscularity of bronze and stone on one side. The vulnerability of graphite on paper on the other. Together, they read less like two different sides of an artist and more like one complete person.
Abandoned is a rare chance to see the last, most personal works of a sculptor who spent six decades refusing to be limited by anyone or anything, including the materials she worked with. Across bronze, stone, terracotta, and wood, it’s a complete portrait of an artist at the height of her powers and at the very end of her life, on view only until 12 September, in a gallery that feels less like an institution and more like a home.
