Thematically, her latest series focuses on the "unseen portrait." One standout piece, Left on Read (3:14 AM) , depicts no face. Instead, it shows a pair of hands hovering over a glowing smartphone, the screen reflecting a cascade of green text bubbles that stop abruptly. The hands are rendered in exquisite, painful detail: the tremor of anxiety, the tension in the knuckles, the smudged nail polish. The background is a deep, resonant black punctuated by the pale blue light of the device. It is a portrait not of a person, but of a feeling—the specific, hollow ache of digital abandonment.
: Beyond the lens, she has expanded into digital painting and has even launched her own skincare and beauty brand, Skkinix , in late 2025. The Performing Artist: Television and Music
The art world has taken notice. Preview snippets of the series shared on social media have already sparked a frenzy among collectors, with several pieces reportedly sold via pre-sale before the official gallery opening.
What makes Sharma’s latest chapter so compelling is her refusal to take an easy stance. She is neither a Luddite decrying technology nor a cheerleader for the metaverse. Instead, she acts as an archaeologist of the present, sifting through the debris of our daily notifications, likes, and swipes to find the genuine human emotion buried beneath. In her artist statement for the series, she writes, “The screen is not a wall; it is a membrane. My work is about what passes through it—and what gets stuck.”
: Her photographs often reflect social inequality and poverty, aiming to forge a visceral connection between the viewer and the subject.
The core of her new aesthetic lies in a technique she calls "digital palimpsest." Viewing her works—whether on a gallery wall via a high-res projection or through a phone screen in one’s living room—one sees layers of data: faint, ghosted screenshots of WhatsApp conversations, pixelated glitches from corrupted video files, and the ghostly outlines of social media interfaces. Over these digital ghosts, Sharma paints or draws using bold, almost violent strokes of physical media—charcoal, oil pastels, and even smudged coffee—which she then scans and re-integrates. The result is a visual tension between the cold, perfect grid of the digital and the warm, chaotic bleed of the analog.
We sat down with Riya to discuss why she decided to pivot her style, the "fear of the blank canvas," and why silence is her biggest inspiration. Link in bio to read the full feature!
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