Gauri Torgalkar
Resume
Gauri Torgalkar is a visual artist and an urban designer with over 20 years experience in architecture and urban design. She has taught visual graphics, freehand drawing, and urban sketching and for over 10 years to graduate and undergraduate students from various fields. As a passionate advocate of sketching the urban environment, Gauri firmly believes that we ‘really see’ our environment when we draw it. She also believes that fluency in sketching results in fluency in thinking, designing and communication.
After drawing the built environment for most of her life, Gauri is now pursuing her passion – visual art. Her work reimagines the Australian landscape altered through the lens of personal memory and narratives inspired by Indian textiles, folklore and miniature painting. With her work she aims to introduce her Indian aesthetic in the Australian contemporary art conversation and contribute to the perceptions of our land and its complex cultural narratives. Her project with Cumberland Council won the Create NSW Small Projects Grant in 2022 and her artworks have been shown in several prestigious exhibitions in Sydney including the Greenway Art Prize (which she won in 2015), Adelaide Perry Prize, Blacktown Art Prize, and overseas at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, USA.
Her work is held in public and private collections in Australia, India and the United States. She lives and works in Ryde, the land of the Wallumettegal people.
Gauri graduated with a Bachelors degree in Architecture from Mumbai University, India, in 2000, and a Masters degree in Architecture & Urban Design from Kent State University, USA, in 2003. Along with maintaining a professional art practice, Gauri currently works part-time at an urban design firm in Chippendale as an Associate in Urban Design.