Santhi EN is a visual artist based in Thrissur, Kerala. Her practice draws deeply from personal memory and local landscapes, often portraying the quiet rhythms of life in small-town Kerala. Santhi’s paintings revisit childhood through scenes of children playing games and of moments rendered with a delicate stillness and clarity. Working with a muted colour palette and minimal compositional elements, her human figures are often set against soft introspective backgrounds. Her artworks are gentle portraits of innocence which are counterbalanced by recurring symbols of transition and resilience.
A self-taught artist, Santhi explored in her earlier works what it means to long for traditions that are slowly disappearing, capturing the quiet tension between memory and erasure, fear and fascination. The resulting body of work became a personal archive of ancestral time, infused with both presence and absence.
Santhi EN has shown her work at several notable exhibitions such as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2022-23), where her paintings were widely appreciated for their subtle emotional depth and evocative storytelling. Her work has been featured in Lokame Tharavadu (2021), a major survey of contemporary art from Kerala curated by Bose Krishnamachari. Santhi’s growing body of work continues to gain recognition for the way it gently preserves the textures of a disappearing world while speaking to contemporary experiences of loss, change, and rootedness.