The Founding Story

Two painters.
One conversation.
A collective born from recognition.

Some collectives are planned.

Gulal was felt.

Kajal Zaveri and Rujuta Paradkar are both self-taught painters, both based in the New York, and originally from India. What drew them together wasn't geography or biography but something visible; the particular fearlessness with which each of them reaches for color.

Kajal has spent more than a decade building a practice that moves between the open skies of California, the rhythm of New York's streets, and the luminous memory of an Indian childhood. Her landscapes are not observed, they are felt. Bold, free-flowing, uninhibited: she paints the way color lives in the body before the mind names it. Her work has been collected internationally, featured in Elle Décor, placed in homes through Williams Sonoma, and shown at major art fairs from New York, San Francisco, Miami to the Hamptons.

Rujuta paints the world immediately in front of her .Where Kajal reaches outward into landscape and sky, Rujuta draws inward toward the intimate and the human. Her figurative and abstract work is meticulous and pays a lot of attention to color, pattern, and surface ; a painter's eye trained on the beauty of ordinary, daily things, making them special with her artistic voice. She has exhibited across New York, with her oil paintings finding homes in Upper East Side storefronts, Redwood Art Group fairs, and gallery walls from New York to New Mexico.

Together, they are a complete conversation. Both reach for color with the same instinct; not as decoration, not as symbol, but as the primary language of feeling. When they began talking about what they shared, it became clear that what they were describing wasn't just two practices running in parallel. It was the beginning of something collective. Gulal Art Collective was founded on the belief that artists who have crossed worlds , who carry one visual memory into another life, another place, another canvas, have something irreplaceable to offer the contemporary art spaces of New York. And that the act of making art and the act of giving it back to the community are not separate things.

THE NAME

Why Gulal

गुलाल · Hindi / Sanskrit origin

गुलाल

The vivid, finely powdered pigment thrown in celebration,most famously at Holi, the festival of color, but also used in festive ceremonies, and daily acts of joy across South Asia. Gulal is color freed from its container. Released into the air, it belongs to no one and everyone at once.

We didn't choose this name to label ourselves. We chose it because it describes exactly what we believe art should do.

Gulal is not applied carefully. It is released — thrown with both hands, in full joy, without knowing exactly where it will land.

That is how Kajal paints. That is how Rujuta sees. Color not as a considered decision but as an instinct ; something released rather than placed, something that travels further than you intended and lands more beautifully than you planned.

In the festivals of our childhood, gulal was everywhere. On palms and foreheads. In the folds of white kurtas. Dissolving into water. Staining the sky. It was joyful and communal and completely impermanent — and that impermanence was the whole point. You threw it because it was beautiful to throw. You received it because being marked by color, by someone else's joy, is its own kind of grace.We carry that spirit into every canvas we make and every space we inhabit as a collective — art fairs, gallery walls, hospital rooms, community classrooms. Color thrown outward, freely, in the belief that it will find who needs it.

gulal

OUR VALUES

What we believe
about color, community,
and the act of painting.

I — On color

Color is not decoration. It is testimony.

We believe color is the most direct route from the interior of a painter to the interior of a viewer. Before a title is read, before a price is consulted, before a wall label is found its the color that speaks. It speaks of the skies a painter grew up under, the grass they stood in, the emotions and observations they have known. We are painters who approach color not as a tool but as a language , the one we learned before we learned any other. Our work asks collectors to receive it the same way: not as statement but as sensation. Not as meaning but as feeling. That is the oldest conversation painting knows how to have, and we intend to keep having it.

II — On community

Art made in joy belongs to more than its maker.

Gulal Art Collective has been built on a simple conviction that the act of selling and the act of giving away artwork are part of the same gesture. We participate in art fairs and curated exhibitions because we believe accessible, affordable, joyful painting deserves to be in the rooms where art is bought and collected. And we donate work to pediatric hospitals, auction pieces for NGOs, and teach art in community classrooms because we believe that same painting belongs in rooms where people need it most. We do not see these as separate missions. The generosity that produces a bold canvas is the same generosity that carries it to a hospital wall. One practice, one spirit.

III —On what we are building

A platform that grows by giving artists what they deserve: room, recognition, and belonging.

Gulal Art Collective begins with two founding artists and is built to become more. As we grow, we will invite painters whose work shares our instinct — who reach for color freely, who carry the memory of other skies into their New York studios, who believe that art-making and community-giving are inseparable. What we offer every artist we bring into the collective is not just exhibition opportunity. It is a home inside a shared purpose. A name that means something. A community of makers who understand that the most generous thing a painter can do is throw color into the world — and trust that it lands where it needs to.