Rhea Maheshwari is a visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated with a Masters in Visual Art with First Class Honours from AUT in 2021. Her bachelor's degree included a six-month residency at Academie Minerva in Groningen, Netherlands and a residency in Mumbai, India in 2019. In 2018 she won the Board's Choice award in the Eden Arts Art School Award, Joint Overall Winner for the Eden Arts Young Artists Award and the Gordon Harris Award for Excellence in Visual Arts.
Rhea's paintings and drawings explore a way of intuitive and subjective map making.
She draws inspiration from 17th and 18th century Mughal miniatures, in particular their decorative and ornamental elements. They lend themselves to represent a psychological territory that connects her to multiple cosmologies, geographies, and cultures at once in a relational tapestry. She understands her practice within the paradigm of Tantra which includes self-reflection, love and ritual as method. Embellishment and mythology allow her to stylise her own personal experiences and desire to express emotion, or psycho-spiritual moods known as rasa in Indian aesthetics.