Flyer image: The Groom, 2024.
Oil on canvas. 36 x 36 inches.
NEW YORK, NY –– All Street Gallery presents multidisciplinary artist Annu Yadav’s solo exhibition curated by Bebe Uddin, Gold God Meat, which displays a series of paintings, sculptural installations, and sketches that animate the precarious tension between reality and artifice; “I need to escape reality in order to confront it,” says Yadav. The exhibition’s title represents the convergence of nature and divinity, power and beauty, and lust and sexuality. Through a visceral exploration of feminine nature as both divine reclamation and corporeal surrender, Yadav asserts womanhood’s role in genesis—ushering the binaries of life and death, masculine and feminine. In her world of fragmented anatomies, bodies long for an unspoiled past while fusing with animals, plants, and the cosmos, generating new corporealities.
In Gold God Meat, the female body becomes a monument, effigy, and site of fury, where the weight of expectation and experience converge in metaphysical and surrealist reimaginings of a life thrust into fleshly wonders of an infringed divine feminine. These spectral forms, suspended between presence and absence, evoke the rites of passage that mark womanhood—moments of rupture, transformation, and disillusionment. Yadav shifts the message of feminism from one of permission to a reclamation of inherent truth—the divine vitality carried within the feminine. She examines the reconciliation of lust, power, faith, violence, motherhood, greed, and love, all while carrying the potential for creation within.
In an exploration of masculinity and femininity in Yadav’s The Groom, honor and pity frame matrimony in this danse macabre. A portrait of a garlanded groom, enshrined in an ornate frame, does not rest on solid ground but is mounted atop a monstrous steed—quivering under the weight of inheritance. Flesh writhes, adorned with unblinking eyes, as if society’s gaze is etched into his being. Masculinity here is not exalted but burdened, a marionette of lineage and duty, ensnared by the sanctity of marriage.
Left: The Encounter, 2024. Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches.
Right: Self Replicating Organism, 2025. Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches.
In a similar expression of tension and duality, in Self Replicating Organism, a woman’s body appears both inverted and duplicated—one half bound in ritual, the other surging through water, resisting and transforming. She does not submit to suffering but wields it as a tool of reclamation, refusing to be consumed by violence or history. The water does not drown her; it churns with spectral lineage, birthing something new. Like Samudra Manthan, she embodies both creation and destruction, the nectar of life and the poisons of the past.
Visually, Yadav infuses esoteric with the aesthetics of Indian vernacular traditions. She envisages a primitive-futurism, where the future is shaped by the wisdom left behind in the past. Her work intertwines art with magic, the sacred, and ritual, offering a space where myth and reality converge. In her work, bodies appear to dissolve and evaporate, yet they seek anchorage in liminal, otherworldly landscapes. Using earthy tones and gold trims (Gota) from her maternal home in Rajasthan, India, her work explores the clash between traditional beliefs and modern femininity. It reflects moments of intense self-reflection, where womanhood is both honored and challenged, revealing the complex mix of devotion, disappointment, power, and limitations.
Yadav strips ritual down to its raw sinew, peeling back the gilded veneer of cultural sanctity to reveal a landscape where the body is both shrine and carcass—regulated, sanctified, consumed. In this phantasmagorical terrain, matrimony is not a romantic vision of bliss, but a reckoning—a ceremonial dismemberment, an altar where flesh—the very meat of the soul—is adorned, fractured, devoured. These compositions are unsettling, unfamiliar, and yet primal, necessary, invoking a presence both beautiful and fear-inducing, a god that is neither benevolent nor cruel, but a witness to the hunger that drives transformation.
About the Artist: Annu Yadav is a NYC-based multimedia visual artist exploring themes of sexual suppression and the gaze. Raised in India, her work draws from personal and cultural narratives, addressing feminine existence through painting, sculpture, and installation. She has exhibited with solo shows at SVA, NYAA, Quiet Lunch (NYC), Casa Lu (Mexico City), and Throckmorton Arts (California). Recent highlights include a brand partnership with French label Orveda and an upcoming solo at All Street Gallery (March 2025). She has participated in group exhibitions at IIDR and Agora Gallery (NYC) and completed residencies at NYAA and SVA in 2024. Yadav’s journey began with wearable art after earning a BA in Fashion and Textile Design from NIFT, Ahmedabad (2007). She transitioned to painting during her Master’s at California College of the Arts (2013). In July 2025, she will present a solo exhibition at Koik Contemporary in Mexico City.
About the Curator: Bebe Uddin is a New York City-based curator of South Asian origin. While studying visual arts and business at NYU, she cultivated a curatorial practice driven by her interest in expanding and exposing diasporic narratives through art. Her work explores themes of identity, migration, artistic process, and cultural hybridity. Uddin has previously curated exhibitions for :iidrr gallery, most recently Objects Without Home (2024), Through Thought (2024), and Gold God Meat (2025).