Ameet Pai (b. India, 1981) is a painter based in Basel, Switzerland. Working in oil on linen, he builds paintings through accumulated transparent layers applied with hand-made rolling pins - a slow, process-led practice developed entirely outside formal art education. After fifteen years in sales and marketing, he turned to painting full-time. His work has been shown and collected globally.
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the practice:
My work begins with a question - not to find an answer, but to find the space that opens before one arrives at an answer.
Questions like what is boundlessness, how do we find balance, who am I are not the subject of my work. They are pointers; the paintings are the space they indicate. That space cannot be named. The work does not try to name it, but allows what lies there to surface.
I came to painting at age 38, after fifteen years in sales and marketing, entirely self-taught. What pulled me in was not as much the desire to make images but the discovery of a process that demanded complete presence - and at times, the dissolution of self.
I work with thin transparent layers of oil on linen, applied with kitchen rolling pins that I have hand-made in different sizes and curvatures. Each layer responds to what lies beneath - the dryness, the texture, the residue of previous passes. The variables are countless; the outcome is never planned. Forms emerge the way patterns reveal on the face of a mountain or the surface of a river; evolving into one of infinite possibilities.
Light passes through these accumulated layers and reflects back from the linen in shifting ways - something that can only be experienced in the presence of the work. This is not a metaphor, it is the literal physics of the painting.
My measure of a painting's quality is the degree to which I was absent in its making. The less friction between maker and material - the less residue of intention, preference, or self - more completely the work becomes itself.
That wholeness is universally resonant.
Solo Exhibitions
2025
A Moment in Timeless - Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, India. January 2025.
Group Exhibitions & Art Fairs
2025
Curator's Choices - Kronen Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland. May – June 2025.
Affordable Art Fair - Hong Kong. May 2025.
2024
Boundless - Art3f Zurich, Switzerland. International contemporary art fair. 2024.
Art de Suisse - Lucerne, Switzerland. Group exhibition. 2024.
2023
Virtual Museum of Swiss Artists - Switzerland. Selected for permanent online exhibition. 2023.
2022
Jehangir Art Gallery - Mumbai, India. Group exhibition. 2022.
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