Sneha Shrestha
A New Calligraphic Abstraction
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston
2025 Foster Prize
By Siba Kumar Das, December 20, 2025
ICA Boston 2025 Foster Prize Installation photo, Sneha Shrestha, Worlds Apart, 15ft x 30ft, acrylic on wall, 2025 Photo by Mel Taing
“I was born and raised in Nepal; I didn’t really meet artists. I’d never been to a gallery in my life when I was in Nepal.” So says Boston-based artist Sneha Shrestha.
​Sneha Shrestha, along with three other artists (1), won the 2025 James and Audrey Foster Prize, an award given biennially by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2). While Nepal did not provide Shrestha with real-life exposure to the contemporary art-world, she incessantly and spontaneously drew and painted as a young person. That the resulting self-created capability harbored real promise became evident upon her becoming a college student in the United States. Subsequently, while moonlighting as a painter and graffiti artist as she earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard University, Shrestha decided to become a career-artist. She has since become one, even as she works part time at the University’s Lakshmi Mittal Institute of South Asian Studies. By now, Shrestha is making an original contribution to calligraphic abstraction in the twenty-first century.
In announcing the 2025 Foster Prize, ICA/Boston said that the selection of the awardees was based on studio visits to over 50 Boston-area artists. The Institute said that the four prize recipients work across multiple media and utilize materials and processes that “uniquely connect their local and global roots.” They exemplify the “internationalism of Greater Boston.” The exhibition showcasing their works, curated by the ICA’s Tessa Bachi Haas, opened on August 28, 2025, and will conclude on January 19, 2026.
Shrestha’s exhibition display, housed in a large tailormade space, comprises four bodies of work: a mural painting, “Worlds Apart,” occupying a wall 15 feet high; a pair of two seven-feet tall paintings expressing her nostalgia for home; a set of 21 paintings selected from a series she has named “Celebration” to mark the immigration journey she has embarked upon; and a parasol-like sculpture hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room. “Worlds Apart” calls for sustained attention since the artist regards it as the centerpiece of her ICA exhibit. But, before we discuss the mural, let’s go back to Shrestha’s formative years in Nepal.
While contemporary art was absent from the world in which Shrestha grew up, exposure to Nepalese classical art did occur through periodic family visits to Hindu temples and Buddhist monasteries, and the celebration of rites and festivals, mostly associated with the seasons and their impacts on agriculture (3). Dominant in the depiction of natural objects in this art were various forms of stylization. Particularly striking was cloud stylization, especially the evocation of embedded energy arising from the link between clouds and monsoon rain. Looking long and deeply into “Worlds Apart,” you’ll likely discern emerging from this immersive, transporting painting the imprint of a sensibility affected by the classical Nepalese art Shrestha saw as a young person. Consider the painting’s energy and expressive vitality. Consider also its elegance and buoyancy.
“Worlds Apart” is a painting of intricate complexity. You first see the colors and forms depicted by the artist in the light falling on the painting from the sources of illumination in the room. But, thanks to Shrestha’s painterly ingenuity, you get the impression that the work is also lit from within, in its north-east but also elsewhere. The principal actors in the drama unfolding before you are the orange, fractal-like calligraphic forms that seemingly swirl, furl, float, and ascend against two layers in the background: a layer of furtive, allusive cobalt-blue calligraphic objects, and an additional layer of grey-black letters representing ‘ka’, the first letter of the Devanagari script, which the Nepali language shares with Sanskrit and other Indic languages. It is this script which Shrestha celebrates in her art, and it is the ‘ka’ layer---symbolizing home, beginnings, the start of communication---that she primarily illuminates from within. “Worlds Apart” owes its depth and unity to both this virtual light and the light falling frontally on the painting. Two worlds, Shrestha’s childhood world and the new world she has chosen for herself, come together. This coalescence also emerges from the dance of the painting’s calligraphic forms, and their blending of symmetry and adjacency to symmetry. Her Devanagari-based fractals are not self-identical, but self-similar, their pattern akin to fractals that appear in nature---another reason why “Worlds Apart” is such an alluring work of art (4).
ICA Boston 2025 Foster Prize Installation photo, Sneha Shrestha, Way Home Friends (left), Way Home Family (right), each 7ft x 5ft, acrylic on canvas, 2025-Photo by Mel Taing
Let’s now turn left from the monumental mural to view the twin seven-feet tall paintings called “Way Home,” one dedicated to Shrestha’s friends in Nepal, the other to her family. The artist creates a trompe-l’oeil effect conjuring the semblance of two arched portals, making astute use of the bespoke architecture she has deployed for these site-specific art-works. Note also the blue portal undersides on the left expressing the idea of home through her signature ‘ka’ pattern decorating their entireties. Beckoning you through the doorways are playful Devanagari fractals lit up by sunny backgrounds depicting in one case tones of orange and tones of yellow in the other. Here, too, Shrestha’s fractals are similar to nature’s fractals.
Turn now to the opposite wall to look at the 21 colorful, identically-sized paintings that belong to Shrestha’s “Celebration” series, dedicated to the artist’s immigration journey, a journey that while crossing milestones summoning joyful celebration also caused her to miss family celebrations in Nepal. Each painting represents an immigration form that Shrestha filled and that she now evokes aesthetically, exhibiting the form’s title and number through Devanagari letters and numbers rendered in stylized, abstract form. Each painting’s colors are those of the garments her mother wore on the missed holiday or festivity, the colors thus symbolically charged, signifying at once Shrestha’s ties to her family and her Nepalese culture. (In the “Celebration” series, the artist had not yet begun to evoke the Devanagari script through fractals of letters. This innovation came later.)
For Shrestha, the last display in her ICA exhibit, the sculpture “Half-nots” well exemplifies the theme of the 2025 Foster Prize, namely, making connections between local and global roots. It also brings to full circle the bringing together of the worlds the artist’s works spring from. While the gilded steel object celebrating ‘ka’ was fabricated in Somerville, a city in Greater Boston, the red gold-braided cloth fringing it was sourced from Kathmandu, where the cloth was handloomed by the same artisan who makes similar textiles for Hindu temples visited by Shrestha’s family. The creation of the sculpture thus spanned two continents. Umbrellas similar to the sculpture are employed in processions marking festivals revered by Shrestha’s Mewar community, their purpose a ritually protective one. You might think of “Half-nots” performing a similar function; it is blessing the ICA exhibit.
World art history tells us that calligraphy has an aesthetic value that can be enormously effective. If you can read the calligraphy and grasp its meaning, so much the better, but that’s not essential, for calligraphy’s beauty is such that it carries a semiotic charge of its own. It’s also significant that Islamic calligraphy and the calligraphies of China and Japan have influenced Western modernism, including the emergence and development of abstraction---such influence continuing in contemporary art. We can’t, however, attribute a similar influence to the Devanagari-based calligraphy that flourished in South Asia for centuries, including Nepal. Devanagari texts in South Asian illuminated manuscripts were neat and elegant but the forms of the letters, as distinct from their textual meaning, were not much exploited to add an extra dimension of expressiveness. Even with the advent of modernist and contemporary art in South Asia, the situation has not significantly altered, despite some forays into Devanagari-based calligraphic abstraction. If you think of this, you will recognize that what Shrestha has done with her oeuvre is immensely important (5). Through her calligraphic abstraction enhancing the beauty and expressiveness of the Devanagari script, she is expanding the frontiers of contemporary art.
ICA Boston 2025 Foster Prize Installation photo, Sneha Shrestha, Celebration Series, 21 paintings, each 18 x 24 , acrylic on canvas, 2025 Photo by Mel Taing
1 The three other recipients are Alison Croney Moses, Yorgos Efthymiadis, and Damien Hoar de Galvan.
2 First established in 1999, the prize (formerly the ICA Artist Prize) and its associated exhibition were endowed by James and Audrey Foster to recognize and nurture exceptional Boston-area artists.
3 For an illuminating discussion of Nepal’s season-dominated culture, see Vajracharya, Gautama V., Nepalese Seasons: Rain and Ritual, 2016, Rubin Museum of Art, New York.
4 For an eye-opening discussion of fractals, see Hosey, Lance, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design, 2012, Island Press, Washington, Covelo, and London, pages 86-90.
5 In this regard, think also of the solo show, “Sneha Shrestha AKA Imagine: Forms + Foundations”, which Aicon Gallery held at New York from April 24 to May 31, 2025