Laxman Shrestha

Laxman Shrestha was born in 1939 in a village in Siraha, Saptari, in southeastern Nepal. He began his higher education at the University of Bihar, Patna, before moving to Bombay to study at the Sir J. J. School of Art, where he spent five years and consistently ranked near the top of his class. At around age 22 he won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he attended the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, then the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, and then Atelier 17, the printmaking studio run by Stanley William Hayter. He completed his formal training at the Central School of Art and Design in London. No source documents a specific degree earned at any of these institutions.

His first solo exhibition, in 1963 at the Taj Art Gallery in Mumbai, launched a career that would include solo shows in Kathmandu in 1964 and 1969, and later in the United States, Germany, and Kenya. He held a French Government Scholarship and a British Council Grant that supported study in Paris and London respectively, and a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) residency in Germany; exact years for these three awards are not documented in public sources. In 1971 a US government-sponsored program took him on a study visit to Baltimore and San Francisco. Since the 1980s he has lived and worked in Bombay, now Mumbai. In February 2025 the Governor of Maharashtra presented him with the Vasudeo Gaitonde Art Lifetime Achievement Award at the 64th Maharashtra State Art Exhibition. As of mid-2026 he continues to live and work in Mumbai; no obituary or death notice has been identified in art press or official sources.

Shrestha's reputation rests on a body of abstract landscape paintings that critics have read as meditative distillations of horizon, light, and color rather than depictions of place. The critic Ranjit Hoskote has written about the artist's monochrome work, shown at Pundole Art Gallery in Mumbai around 2003, in terms of a systematic renunciation of color in favor of a sustained interest in monochrome; the exact publication and wording of that criticism could not be independently verified for this profile. His work is also represented in the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation Collection, housed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) in Mumbai.

Shrestha's market runs primarily through Indian auction houses and dealers, with occasional appearances at Sotheby's and Christie's South Asian sales. A press report describes an AstaGuru online sale on 24 September 2021 in which an Untitled Diptych sold for Rs 52.31 lakh (INR 5,231,000), stated at the time to be a record price for the artist, but this figure could not be independently corroborated by a second source. A June 2026 AstaGuru sale is separately reported to have set new benchmark prices for several Indian artists, but the exact work, price, and date attributable to Shrestha in that sale are not documented. Estimates on other lots at Sotheby's have run in the low thousands of pounds or dollars for smaller works, which points to a market with a strong top end but modest depth beneath it. Public sources also describe a landmark 1986 Christie's sale in India at an unusually high multiple over his then-typical prices, though no exact figure for that sale has been documented.

There is no catalogue raisonne and no certificate-of-authenticity program for Shrestha's work; provenance through galleries such as Pundole Art Gallery and through documented museum and auction history is the main basis for verification. His auction market is thin relative to his museum standing, concentrated in Indian sales, and anchored by a single, not fully corroborated record price report from 2021, so any individual result should be read in that context rather than as evidence of a broad, liquid market. Current gallery representation could not be confirmed from public sources as of this writing, which is itself useful information for anyone assessing where and how to transact in his work.