Guruvinayak Singh Budhwar - Kaam Karma Akanksha

"India Contemporary curated by Veer Hooda" presents a rare opportunity for Collectors and Art lovers in Europe to acquire the original works of highly established Indian Contemporary Artists and create a connection with one of the most vibrant and fast growing art markets in the world.

The Auction is curated by the acclaimed Indo-European artist - Vijit Veer Hooda - in collaboration with the highly esteemed NIV Art Center, New Delhi and available exclusively on Catawiki.

About the Artist: Guruvinayak Singh Budhwar ig : @guruvinayaksingh

Guruvinayak Singh Budhwar is a magical realist painter working out of Chandigarh, India, in oil on canvas.

In 2021 the Korean Cultural Centre India held a national open call to painters of every age across the country. Budhwar was the artist chosen as the best amongst his peers and to represent India that year. Belle du Jour, twenty-six paintings shown at the Centre in New Delhi and covered by The Statesman.

In 2025 he completed the ceiling fresco at Rambha Palace, the restored heritage property on Chilika Lake in Odisha. The work measures 17 by 26 feet across seven Belgian linen panels, painted in hand-ground pigments, and was made over one and a half years at thirteen hours a day. It was reported in the Times of India. His painting has also been written about in The Statesman and across the Hindi press.

The Artist in his own words:

"I call my practice 'magical realism,' a language that allows me to move between the internal and external, where personal memory, mythology, and history collapse into a shared psychological space, a rebellion against 'the outsider's eye'. My paintings are constructed thresholds where the ephemeral is held, suspended, and made 'forever'.

I often think of myself as an emotional hoarder. I collect fragments of feelings, stories, residues of lived and inherited experience, driven by a fear of their disappearance. Painting becomes a way of holding on, of resisting the erosion of memory and meaning. However, I know that nothing is truly permanent, that all attempts at preservation are, in some sense, futile. It is within this tension, between retention and inevitable loss, that my work thrives.

I trace recurring emotional structures across history, paleo-geology, theology, linguistics, and so on. These become echoes of a collective unconscious that surface across time and culture. Magical realism allows me to translate these into image, where the personal becomes porous, and the collective intimate.

I see my works less as depictions but spaces: liminal terrains where memory, myth, and psychology converge. They are encounters, pauses, or even purgatories of feeling, where suppressed emotions can surface and exist without apology.

Materially, I work primarily in oil, a medium chosen as much for its historical weight as for its resistance to time. The slow drying, the layering, the hand-grinding of historical pigments, these are not merely technical decisions, but gestures of duration. Oil painting carries within it a promise of longevity, even as I remain conscious of its eventual decay.

For me, each work becomes an excavation, an attempt to hold what is always already slipping away. I hope they feel less like objects and more like invitations, worlds to step into, stay with, and be changed by."


Selected Exhibitions & Commissions:

Reverberation Within - solo exhibition, Alliance Francaise de Chandigarh (his first exhibition)

Belle du Jour - solo exhibition, twenty-six paintings, Korean Cultural Centre India, New Delhi (2021)

CLKA Annual Art Exhibition (2019-20)

Rambha Palace ceiling fresco - permanent commission, Rambha Palace, Chilika Lake, Odisha (unveiled 2025)


About the Work: Kaam Karma Akanksha

A man's body carries the head of a long billed water bird. He is bent forward at the waist, his back arched, both hands reaching down into the open jaws of a crocodile lying in shallow water, against a bank of exposed roots and dark earth.

The artist on this painting:

"This work expresses desire as non-singular. It roots, coils, and resists being named. The body bends into it, caught between instinct and awareness, hunger and consequence. There's a quiet violence in the grip and the beak, but it isn't entirely destructive, more cyclical, almost inevitable.

The softness of the drapery shows tenderness. Desire carries longing as much as it does appetite. Beneath it, the earth feels ancient, dense with memory, impulse, and decay. The reason of all existence is rooted into desire.

This isn't a clean balance of opposites, but a friction. A constant negotiation between what consumes you and what you willingly offer yourself to."


About Vijit Veer Hooda: ig : @vi_hov

Vijit Veer Hooda is an Indo-European (Austrian) contemporary artist based in Vienna, whose practice is shaped by a deep connection to his Indian roots and a great love for his now home, Europe. Vijit curates out of his studio in Vienna.

Vijit Veer Hooda has exhibited across some of the top galleries and exhibitions in the world and recently finished his sold-out show at Art Basel Miami 2025. This year he will be exhibiting at, among other highly esteemed exhibitions ArtExpo New York and once again for his mail show at Miami Art Based 2026, at multiple exhibitions across Europe and Austria, and returning to Art Basel Miami at the end of the year at the Red Dot Miami Show.

Alongside his own work, Hooda is driven by a clear mission: to make outstanding Indian artistic talent more visible and accessible within the European art market. Positioned between India and Europe, he acts as a cultural bridge, offering early access to artists and narratives that are already gaining significant international recognition.


About the Artwork:

Artist: Guruvinayak Singh Budhwar

Name: Kaam Karma Akanksha

Year: January 2026

Size: 3 feet (90 cm) x 4 feet (120 cm) x 5 cm

Technique: Oil on canvas

Signed and Authenticity: The work is hand signed by the artist and a signed Certificate of Authenticity is provided.

Packaging & Insurance: The painting will be packaged professionally and is fully insured on the way to the buyer.

Duties and import: There are no customs duties on original artworks entering the European Union, the United Kingdom or the United States. Some countries apply an Import VAT to original art at a reduced rate, well below their standard rate, and in the great majority of our shipments nothing is raised at all. Anything that does come up on arrival is handled at our end, and we are of course glad to assist with any question along the way.