Australian Women Artists
The podcast
Ep 73 Kirtika Kain
Kirtika Kain was born in New Delhi, India and raised on Sydney's Northern Beaches, and is making some of the most viscerally powerful art in the country right now.
Kirtika is a printmaker, a painter, and an alchemist. Her works often depict the overlooked. One of the extraordinary ways she does that is by taking materials such as pigments, wax, sindoor, human hair, charcoal, gold and tar and transforming them into works that carry centuries of inherited memory.
Her practice is a reckoning with identity, and what might be termed the silences passed down through generations. But it’s more than that. It's also an act of celebration and the grandeur of a culture that has never been properly archived.
She has shown at the Biennale of Sydney, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and in galleries across Australia and Europe.
Head to the link in my bio to hear our conversation.
Kirtika (@kirtika.kain) is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 (@roslynoxley9)
Images
1. KK in her studio at Parramatta Artists’ Studios, by Garry Trinh
2. Chronicles, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-26
3. Mimetics, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025-26
4. 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art
5. Stone Idols, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery 2021
