Amitabh Ashesh’s forthcoming exhibition Yun Bhi, scheduled to be held at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, from June 10–16, 2025, unveils a new conceptual and painterly platform ‘Yufism’. The neologism encapsulates fluid and genre defying artistic tenets aimed to transcend conventional categories of abstraction and figuration. Resulting works dwell in a liminal space where the visible, the invisible, and the metaphorical coalesce. Yufism, as posited by Amitabh, resists easy classification, embodying instead a poetic visuality that reconfigures perception and meaning.

Trained under Frank Lobdell, renowned for his contributions to the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Amitabh inherits a sensibility rooted in the idea of the image’s autonomy. Lobdell’s emphasis on abstraction bearing a vestige of corporeality echoes subtly through Amitabh’s canvases. However, Amitabh does not merely echo his mentor’s idiom; he reworks and transcends it. His visual grammar moves beyond expressive abstraction or narrative figuration, into a painterly syntax that fuses the symbolic and the mundane in a surreal yet coherent schema.