Divya Balivada

Artist Profile

Divya Balivada (b. 1992, India). Lives and works in London and Goa.

Divya Balivada is a painter working in oil and acrylic on linen, canvas and cotton fabric. Her abstract paintings are built from repeated gestural marks, layered into dense, brightly coloured fields. The work draws on her upbringing in India and addresses memory, gender norms and displacement.

A central part of her practice is a loom she built herself: a wooden frame, 65 x 200 x 115 cm, in which fabric is drawn between two rollers turned by a handle. The rotating surface lets her paint continuously, with no fixed beginning or end, and the finished work can be seen in full only once it is taken off the loom. Works made this way form the Ananta series, named after the Sanskrit word for infinite. Ananta II (2025), oil on linen, measures 325 x 165 cm. Alongside these long works she makes small paintings, such as Inverse Lot (2025), oil and acrylic on linen, 15.2 x 10.2 cm. Her palette draws on the textiles, festivals, architecture and landscape of Goa and Mumbai, where she grew up, and the loom refers to South Asian handloom traditions and their disruption under colonial industrialisation.

Balivada trained as a dentist, receiving a Bachelor of Dental Surgery in 2016, before turning to painting. She completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art (2024) and an MA in Painting (2025) at the Royal College of Art, London. In 2025 she was shortlisted for the inaugural Jaguar x RCA Award and showed in the 43rd Small is Beautiful at Flowers Gallery, London. Her first solo exhibition, In Between, was held at the Royal Society of Arts, London, in 2026. The same year she exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the Goa Open Arts Festival, the Museum of Goa and BUoY, Tokyo. She received the Women Achiever’s Award in Art in Goa in 2024.