The Bodhi Tree

Rajashree Thakker
Born: 14 May 1965, Vasco, Goa

Education: BFA, Goa College of Art, 1986

Rajashree Thakker is a Goa-based artist with a career spanning more than twenty-five years. Her practice has moved fluidly between abstraction and figuration, ultimately evolving into a body of work that interlaces the sensual with the conceptual. In recent years, she has extended her explorations beyond canvas to diverse surfaces, most notably in the creation of shrines designed to focus and encourage spiritual contemplation.

Crafted in wood, these shrines feature multiple doors that alternately conceal and reveal painted surfaces, creating a dynamic interplay between presence and absence. Thakker’s thematic concerns draw deeply from the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo—particularly his epic poem Savitri—as well as Buddhism, haiku, and world mythologies and literatures.

Balancing instinct with reason, her work fuses spiritual inquiry with design sensibility, offering layered portrayals of the self in relation to the wider world.