London · Contemporary Painter
The studio of Anugrah Mishra — paintings that approach displacement and the refugee crisis through memory, interiors and stillness rather than spectacle. Winner of the Freelands Painting Prize 2024.
Selected Works
From the gallery
The Artist
Anugrah Mishra is a London-based contemporary painter whose work explores migration, displacement and the psychological realities of people affected by conflict, exile and forced movement. Rather than document the refugee crisis, his paintings approach it through a psychological lens — recurring motifs of interiors, liminal spaces, abandoned rooms and birds function as metaphors for memory and fractured identity, drawing on atmosphere, silence, domestic objects and archetypal references from psychoanalysis, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
“Painting offers something that film cannot: stillness. It resists the momentum of the narrative and compels the viewer to linger.”
Public Art · Cambridge
The Human Current
120 square metres · Jesus Green Lido, Cambridge · commissioned by Cambridge City Council
Painted across wooden fencing and curved architectural surfaces along the lido's path, The Human Current responds to the site's relationship with water, movement and communal life. Abstracted human figures move through layered bands of blue and green, referencing both the River Cam and the experience of outdoor swimming — simplified figures acting as shared symbols of motion, wellbeing and collective presence rather than individual portraits. The commission began with Jesus Green Lido assistant manager Annabel Wright, who was looking for a positive response to persistent graffiti on the pathway walls, and, after researching artists, connected with Anugrah — who had studied at Anglia Ruskin University nearby.
“The work is designed to be encountered in passing by walkers, cyclists and swimmers, unfolding gradually along the length of the site.”