Priyanka Pulijal Verified listing

My work investigates how imagined afterlives shape our understanding of the present. I am interested in the thresholds between the visible world and the speculative one—the spaces where the unknown becomes a tool for interpreting emotion, memory, and lived experience. My paintings function as portals into these in-between realms, where psychological states and cosmic landscapes converge.

Lokas: heavens, hells, and the realms in between, my ongoing series, approaches the afterlife not as a singular destination but as a multiplicity of possible worlds. Each painting proposes a different cosmology, drawing on narrative structures that cultures have long used to explain what cannot be seen. I reinterpret these ideas through contemporary color, texture, and spatial distortion to create environments that feel both ancient and futuristic, grounded and otherworldly.

Rather than illustrating definitive answers, the work treats the beyond as an open question—one that reveals as much about our internal life as it does about any imagined realm. By visualizing alternate planes of existence, I explore how fear, desire, and belief become architectures that govern how we move through the world now.

My practice builds on a lineage of artists who use speculative space as a site of inquiry. Through atmospheric gradients, shifting perspectives, and dreamlike motion, I construct cosmologies that invite viewers to consider their own relationship to the unknown. The work positions the afterlife as a metaphor for possibility: a way of understanding the self through the worlds we imagine beyond this one.