Riya Sharma, Artist, Latest Here

Thematically, her latest series focuses on the "unseen portrait." One standout piece, Left on Read (3:14 AM) , depicts no face. Instead, it shows a pair of hands hovering over a glowing smartphone, the screen reflecting a cascade of green text bubbles that stop abruptly. The hands are rendered in exquisite, painful detail: the tremor of anxiety, the tension in the knuckles, the smudged nail polish. The background is a deep, resonant black punctuated by the pale blue light of the device. It is a portrait not of a person, but of a feeling—the specific, hollow ache of digital abandonment.

For those who have followed Sharma since her early days on platforms like Instagram and Behance, the evolution is striking. Her earlier work, while technically proficient, often dwelt in the realm of the fantastical—ethereal beings, cosmic landscapes, and a muted, dreamy pastel palette. The "latest" Riya Sharma, however, has turned her gaze inward and, paradoxically, outward toward the gritty, tangible realities of modern urban life. Ephemeral Echoes , unveiled in a solo exhibition at Mumbai’s Art Musings gallery last month and simultaneously released as an augmented reality (AR) collection, is a meditation on digital fatigue, memory, and the fragile intimacy of human connection in the age of the screen. riya sharma, artist, latest

The core of her new aesthetic lies in a technique she calls "digital palimpsest." Viewing her works—whether on a gallery wall via a high-res projection or through a phone screen in one’s living room—one sees layers of data: faint, ghosted screenshots of WhatsApp conversations, pixelated glitches from corrupted video files, and the ghostly outlines of social media interfaces. Over these digital ghosts, Sharma paints or draws using bold, almost violent strokes of physical media—charcoal, oil pastels, and even smudged coffee—which she then scans and re-integrates. The result is a visual tension between the cold, perfect grid of the digital and the warm, chaotic bleed of the analog. Thematically, her latest series focuses on the "unseen