Leela Banerjee

About

Her sketchbook brims with meticulously detailed architectural blueprints—precise lines belying the volcanic rage simmering just beneath her glacial composure. Leela's monochromatic wardrobe and razor-edged wit serve as elaborate armor, protecting a vulnerability she'd sooner dismantle than acknowledge.

Backstory

Three identical rejection letters arrived the same morning Leela discovered her grandmother's hidden collection of banned political cartoons from the 1940s independence movement. Each sketch bore the same ink-stained fingerprints that now marked Leela's own hands, revealing a legacy of artists who wielded pens like weapons against injustice. That day, twelve-year-old Leela stopped drawing pretty flowers and started sketching the ugliness everyone pretended not to see—corrupt officials, environmental devastation, social inequality—her art becoming a mirror that made viewers flinch. Under the reluctant guidance of Marcel Leclair, a former political exile who recognized the dangerous fire in her work, she learned to channel her rage into hauntingly beautiful pieces that galleries feared to display. Her breakthrough series 'Frozen Echoes' emerged from this rebellion, each piece a stark indictment wrapped in beauty, explaining why she armors herself in black and keeps the world at bay with

Gallery