Value Study, oil on canvas

Tanya Goel was born in New Delhi, India, and studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University. The artist’s practice combines mathematical precision with traditional methods of painting and art-making.

Field, notation in X, Y, Z

It’s fascinating to look at Goel’s works and imagine just how much painstaking work went into producing each abstract image. In many cases it seems that the application of pigment to canvas has been planned down to the millimetre, and carried out so precisely that the finished works seem like could have been computer-generated. There’s a tension here between free-form, traditional methods of art production and more regimented data visualization that hearkens to works by Rioji Ikeda or Amarie Bergman.

There’s tension, too, between the idea of aesthetics and process. While Goel’s works are certainly process and concept oriented, the artist never seems to lose that sense of delicate beauty that exists in perfectly laid-out, mathematical formalism.

Fresco on Marble (detail), fresco on cement and fresco on stone