Jaipur Galore, After Sawai Jai Singh, Jaipur, India, 7.4m x 2m, 2025 (Commision for Jaipur Art week)

This behaves like a vast cosmology of the city—part festival, part archive, part visionary map. Sawai Jai Singh, Jaipur’s founder, shaped the city through astronomy, mathematics, and Vedic metaphysics, and this artwork extends that lineage by weaving Hindu astrology directly into its visual logic, populating the composition with AI-generated figures drawn from astrological archetypes. These futuristic characters intermingle with figures from Rajasthani miniature painting and contemporary images of Jaipur’s royal lineage, collapsing centuries of visual culture into a single dazzling field. The huge scale becomes essential: only a surface of this magnitude can contain the dense flow of kites, gods, robots, warriors, vendors, royalty, and digital avatars spiralling through a shared urban sky. Traditional pink-hued architecture brushes against drones and satellites; courtly figures from miniatures appear beside twenty-first-century Jaipur elites; celestial beings drift over street performers and pilgrims. The city emerges not as a fixed location but as an unfolding mandala in which urban planning, mythology, and digital futurism remain in constant dialogue. Created as a commission for Jaipur Art Week 2025, the work functions as both homage and transformation, extending Jai Singh’s original astronomical vision into a post-digital era. It becomes a kaleidoscope of Jaipur’s layered identities, where heritage and hypermodernity collide in exuberant abundance. As Jai Singh himself observed, “From the first dawning of reason in his mind … he was entirely devoted to the study of mathematical science” (Kaye, 1918), an ethos that pulses through the artwork and guides its synthesis of history, cosmology, and contemporary imagination.

Reference
Kaye, G. R. Astronomical Observatories of Jai Singh. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1918.

Mock up, Badi Chaupad, Jaipur, India