"I paint to bridge the ordinary and the enchanting, capturing the quiet magic that lives in everyday corners of the city. Through layered urban landscapes, I explore memory, movement, and belonging. Using color, light, and intricate details to reveal both nostalgia and possibility. My work invites viewers to pause, notice, and reimagine their relationship with the places they move through every day."

Shrey Purohit

Artist + Curator + Administrator + Advocate

Born in Mumbai, based in San Francisco since 2018

I'm Shrey Purohit. Purohit means authorship. I've always liked that.

I grew up in Colaba, in South Mumbai. Big-town energy, small-town vibe, is how I've described it before. My parents are both doctors. I named my little sister when I was three. I still call that my first creative project.

I'm dyslexic. I believe anything's possible, if you stay persistent and stay honest about who you are.

As a teenager in Mumbai, I ran a design business and hired employees. People don't take kindly to being bossed around by a seventeen year old. I moved toward painting instead. Jas Charanjiva, at Kulture Shop in Mumbai, was a mentor to me from the time I was fifteen.

My grandfather died when I was fifteen too. He'd once wanted to live abroad and never got the chance. When I left for San Francisco at nineteen, over my parents' early objections, I understood later that I was finishing something for both of us. That idea still shows up in my self portraits.

I have a BFA from California College of the Arts. Before that, a diploma in communication design from ISDI Parsons The New School in Mumbai. I paint in oil, in the American realist tradition. My subject is this city. Fog. Wet streets. Cable cars. Dusk light. Transit. I work with a cinematic sensibility.

Edward Hopper and Caravaggio are two of my influences. So is the philosopher Alan Watts. I paint with music on, usually Bad Bunny, or an audiobook about art history running in the background. I don't buy into the starving artist idea. Having enough to eat while I work matters to me.

In 2026, my solo show Assembled Cities ran at Root Division's Frank Ratchye Project Space. I used a dual date titling system in that show, pairing present day moments with Indus Valley artifacts from thousands of years earlier.

My current project is Unsung SF: Portraits of the Working City. It's ten paintings, running from July 2026 to July 2028. The San Francisco Arts Commission awarded it with an Arts Impact Endowment grant, scoring in the top 10 out of 300 submitters.

I also founded Ingleside Gallery in 2021. It's a nomadic project where I've placed contemporary art in cafes, barbershops, radio stations and real estate offices around the city, and I've worked to build exhibition opportunities for emerging and overlooked artists. I manage and lead exhibitions and partnerships at ArtSpan, San Francisco's largest open studios nonprofit. I'm a Program Assistant for the Svane Family Foundation's Culture Forward initiative. I have written art criticism for Roborant Review.

If you want to follow the work, join the Postcard Club, or find me on Instagram at @shreypurohit.

Artist Statement

I paint city life in oil and acrylic. My subject is San Francisco, its streets, transit, weather and people. Capturing the fog, the early bus rides, the storefront signs that carry a neighborhood's pulse. There's a version of this city that only shows up at the edges of the day, half asleep, half lit, and that's the one I keep coming back to. I grew up in Mumbai and call San Francisco home now, and both cities show up in the work.

I build the paintings in layers. Along with the paint, I work in collaging ephemera, old photographs, signage, flyers, receipts, paper that was part of a place before it ended up on my canvas. My process starts outside, drawing, documenting and painting plein air first, then bringing the work into the studio and opening it up into something wider, more cinematic.

My early work followed neighborhood scenes, transit and city streets. Lately I've been more interested in the people who actually keep this city moving. My current project, Unsung SF: Portraits of the Working City, is a series of large scale portraits of postal carriers, baristas, cleaners, the people whose routines hold the place together. Each one starts with a paid interview, and each painting carries real objects from that person's day, the things that shape how they move through it.

What I want, in the end, is simple. I want the people in these paintings to be looked at the way they deserve to be looked at, and I want a record that their work mattered. Art doesn't need four walls and a price list to count. Some of its best homes are the ordinary places people already walk through every day.

Unsung SF: Portraits of the Working City

This is the grant-funded project. Ten large scale portraits of the people who keep this city running, postal carriers, baristas, cleaners. Each one starts with a paid interview, and each painting carries real objects from that person's day. Every painting starts with paying attention. I ask before I paint and I try to stay careful with what I take from them and how I use it. The San Francisco Arts Commission backed it with an Arts Impact Endowment grant. It runs from July 2026 to July 2028.

Collage

This one's newer. Paper collage, gouache, and acrylic on wood panel, built from flat layers of color instead of paint alone. It started after I burned out, both from work and from my last solo show, and needed something that would break me out of an art block. I've been looking at Andrea Bergen and Austin Zombres, two artists who do this kind of paper work better than almost anyone. I release them in small drops, a handful of pieces at a time, through my email list.

Postcard Club

This is the smallest and most personal of the three. Paintings turned postcards, made to catch a fresh angle on the same touristy corners of San Francisco everyone already has a postcard of, and mailed out to people who've signed up, some of them across the world. It's less about the gallery and more about sharing a corner of this city.