Manu Saluja

Sequel      
Oil on Panel
6x6                                                                    

Manu Saluja is an American painter.  Her work fuses the urban landscape of New York City with narratives of it's complex and diverse people, reflecting on themes of identity, control and freedom. Rather than portray a sanitized version of her native city, it’s “wear and tear” becomes a backdrop for these narratives. Allowing light to flow over cracked, soiled tiles and chromatic, rusted steel girders, she reinvents these spaces as metaphors for the fragility, strength, beauty and corrosion that coexist in nature.

Saluja’s paintings have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto,  and the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art in Wisconsin.  Winner of the 2019 BP Portrait Travel Award,  her resulting paintings were exhibited at the Aberdeen Art Gallery in Scotland, and displayed virtually with London’s National Portrait Gallery in 2020. Saluja has participated in numerous group shows., and has work in public and private collections in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and India.  Her paintings have been written of in American Art Collector, Fine Art Connoisseur, Artists & Illustrators, the Huffington Post, and Fast Company Design.

Saluja holds a B.A. in Psychology from Barnard College. She went on to study with John Frederick Murray privately and at the School of Visual Arts, receiving her BFA in 1997.  She is currently Adjunct Professor of Painting at the New York Academy of Art where she received her MFA in 2013, and Montclair State University.

Winner of the 2019 BP Portrait Exhibition Travel Award, Saluja’s work is currently touring London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

Born in Brooklyn in 1971, and a long time resident of Queens, Saluja lives and works in Long Island, NY.