Artist Statement
“I create ceramic and stone sculptures alongside mixed-media paintings using dry pigment, acrylic, and oil. My work carries a longing for a primal way of living, sensing, and navigating the world, not as a return, but as a reawakening within the present. It unfolds as a productive force against the backdrop of rapidly changing environments, vanishing biodiversity, increasingly technologically mediated experiences, and a growing sense of unreality.
Clay extends meaning into the elemental, its deep materiality inseparable from my own — I come from a farming family in north India, where soil was never abstract. All life begins and ends in soil, making it the central archive of our shared planetary history. At a time when it is most threatened & depleted, I find it prophetic to shape the material to create new origin stories that hold its fragility & resilience. My sculptures, in contrast to the polished, frictionless materiality of the digital age, remain largely unglazed, stone-textured, and rendered in earthy tones that echo the surfaces of the natural physical world. My work is also shaped by a background in Design — its sensibilities continue to inform how I refine form, build composition, and arrive at a cohesive visual & structural narrative.
My paintings emerge from the physical forms and reach toward the intangible — vibrant surreal dreamscapes that contemplate the metaphysical and open a passage into the spiritual. The two evolve not in contrast but in continuity, becoming cosmogonies where idea and matter combine, the natural and artificial intertwine, past and future converge, and spirits take on tangible, embodied form. Dualities dissolve within themes of transmutation, rebirth, and coexistence, and the contours of a fantastical, emergent world come into view.
As an artist I work with wonder; as a designer I channel intention — together offering forms and ideas as propositions for a world waiting to be realised.”
Artist Bio
Latika Nehra-Gross is a Berlin-based visual artist and sculptor working primarily with ceramics and mixed media. Her practice engages the archetypal act of creation, life in its emergence, persistence, and transformation, approaching matter as a site where myth, material intelligence, and speculative futures converge.
Drawing on the sensibilities of early makers, for whom the natural and the spiritual were inseparable, Nehra constructs imaginative worlds in which distinctions between the organic and the artificial, the given and the constructed, begin to dissolve. Her work unfolds within futuristic, often surreal frameworks that reflect on technology’s shifting entanglements with the body and environment.
Working with clay as a material drawn from living soil and microbial life, she expands its expressive potential through form, texture, and interaction. Her sculptures frequently remain unglazed, retaining earthen, stone-like surfaces that foreground tactility and material presence. In parallel, her paintings develop as vibrant, dreamlike terrains informed by early creation myths. Together, these works form an interconnected narrative that reasserts embodied knowledge and the value of the tangible within an increasingly mediated world.
Nehra lives and works in Berlin and regularly travels to India to engage with traditional craft practices, contributing to their evolving contemporary discourse. She holds a degree in Visual Design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, and a Master of Arts in Design from Anhalt University, Dessau.
EXHIBITIONS & GROUP SHOWS
2026
HOLDING THE THRESHOLD, Neues Ufer, Berlin
MEMORY FIELDS, WIRWIR ROOM, Berlin
WHEN THE MUSIC IS OVER, THE DESTROYER IS OFF TO DUTY, INTO THE UNRULY REALMS with RTO, YCP-India Art Fair, New Delhi, India
MOONJAR at HAU, CTM Festival, Berlin, Germany
2025
MOONJAR with Kat Válastur, Festival of Future Nows, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
TRACE, Tappan Collective, Los Angels, USA
FORMED, Ceramic Salon, Berlin, Germany
Cast in Memory, Gallery Latitude 28, Delhi Contemporary Art Week, Bikaner House
ID collectibles, Gallery Latitude 28, India Design, New Delhi, India
Blue is the Warmest Color, Onna House Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida, USA
2024
Sculpture Trails, Kings Palace, Gallery Pangolin London, UK
2023
De Pury Primary Market Auction: FIRE - Contemporary Glass & Ceramics
How Well You Walk Through the Fire, Obey Art Space, Berlin, Germany
The White Room, Nella Beljan Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2022
Remote Life, Cultivate Art Global, Mumbai, India
2021
After Origin, Round Them Oranges, Jaipur, India
Sculptural Connections, Room Capacity, Berlin, Germany