Artist Statement
I create ceramic and stone sculptures alongside mixed-media paintings using dry pigment, acrylic, and oil. My work carries a longing for the primal, 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, with its deep materiality, extends meaning into something elemental: it recalls the microbial life that begins and ends in soil, and soil itself as an archive of our shared planetary history. My sculptures thus remain largely unglazed, stone-textured, and rendered in earthy tones that echo natural surfaces, drawing the viewer into closer contact with the physical world. Form and its symbolic potential are central to this practice, ideas conveyed through direct, tactile engagement with matter, refined by sensibilities that also shape my work in Design.
From these forms, my paintings emerge as vibrant, surreal dreamscapes that reach toward the immaterial, inviting reflection on what lies beyond the physical and perhaps opening a passage into the spiritual. The two bodies of work evolve not in contrast but in continuity, opening intuitive ways of seeing and sensing.
My work is connected through narrative, a process I call world-building. Through dreamlike and speculative scenarios, I create hybrid ecologies where the natural and artificial intertwine, where past and future converge and spirits take on tangible, embodied form. These worlds are shaped by imaginaries of transmutation, rebirth, and coexistence within the natural world, materializing and dissolving dualities, letting the contours of a fantastical, emergent world come into view.
I begin with intention, work with wonder, and offer forms as proposition, drawn from archaic knowledge, reaching toward a world waiting to be realized.
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