Riya Sharma, Artist, Latest [2021] May 2026

Thematically, her latest series focuses on the "unseen portrait." One standout piece, Left on Read (3:14 AM) , depicts no face. Instead, it shows a pair of hands hovering over a glowing smartphone, the screen reflecting a cascade of green text bubbles that stop abruptly. The hands are rendered in exquisite, painful detail: the tremor of anxiety, the tension in the knuckles, the smudged nail polish. The background is a deep, resonant black punctuated by the pale blue light of the device. It is a portrait not of a person, but of a feeling—the specific, hollow ache of digital abandonment.

The core of her new aesthetic lies in a technique she calls "digital palimpsest." Viewing her works—whether on a gallery wall via a high-res projection or through a phone screen in one’s living room—one sees layers of data: faint, ghosted screenshots of WhatsApp conversations, pixelated glitches from corrupted video files, and the ghostly outlines of social media interfaces. Over these digital ghosts, Sharma paints or draws using bold, almost violent strokes of physical media—charcoal, oil pastels, and even smudged coffee—which she then scans and re-integrates. The result is a visual tension between the cold, perfect grid of the digital and the warm, chaotic bleed of the analog. riya sharma, artist, latest

In conclusion, the latest iteration of Riya Sharma is that of a translator. She translates the invisible architecture of our digital lives into the universal language of texture, color, and form. By embracing the very tools that create our alienation—the smartphone, the social media feed, the digital glitch—and turning them into instruments of empathy, she has produced a body of work that feels both profoundly of this moment and timeless. In Ephemeral Echoes , Sharma does not ask us to log off. She asks us to look closer at the screen, and beyond it, to the trembling hands that hold it. That is the mark of an artist not just evolving, but arriving. Thematically, her latest series focuses on the "unseen