Nibha Akireddy is a Bay Area-raised and San Francisco-based artist who creates compositions that pull from the stories she encounters through her communities and experiences across engineering, art, and everyday art forms. She creates vivid paintings that incorporate layers of color, light, and maximalist motifs to retell histories.
References to movie posters, music albums, and popular media are overlaid with motifs from the everyday art forms of tattooing, sport, textile, jewelry, and food. She explores history through the art forms that shape our lives, spaces, and tastes, yet are often neglected in fine art spaces. Her work reframes conversations around cultural ownership, appropriation, and separation to ones about fluidity through artistic exchange. She pulls from exoticized aesthetics, traditional South Asian tattooing and movement practices, and histories of food and drink to explore painting as a form of research and storytelling.