Avantika Bawa

Avantika Bawa is an artist and educator based in Portland, OR, and her hometown, New Delhi, India. She holds an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India.

Informed by the built environment, her drawings and sculptures draw on minimalist traditions, emphasizing reductive form, modularity, geometry, and shifts in scale. She has participated in residencies at Ucross, Skowhegan, MacDowell, the Kochi Biennial Foundation, and Djerassi, among others. Her solo exhibitions include the Portland Art Museum; Schneider Museum, Ashland, OR; Suyama Space, Seattle, WA; the Columbus Museum, GA; Saltworks Gallery and the Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta, GA; Nature Morte and Gallery Maskara, India; Lazy Eye, Yucca Valley, CA; and Disjecta, Portland, OR. Large-scale installations include iterations of The Scaffold Series at Rann of Kutch, India (2019–20); Art Beyond, Ashland, OR (2021); and The Sculpture Park, Jaipur, India (2024).

Bawa co-founded Drain: Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture in 2004. From 2014–2023, she served on the Oregon Arts Commission. She is currently a Professor of Art at Washington State University, Vancouver.