KATHMANDU, FEBRUARY 20
The Nepal Art Council Gallery at Babar Mahal saw a full house on the evening of February 20, when In Between Two Worlds, a joint exhibition by Shivangini Rana and Chirag Bangdel, opened to collectors, art lovers, and the simply curious. Inaugurated by Rani Usha Raje Rana and Pratima Pande MBE, the show quickly became one of the most talked-about art events of the season in Kathmandu.
For Rana, the journey to this moment has been anything but conventional. She did not arrive at art through formal training. Instead, she studied hotel management in Switzerland and built a substantial career in hospitality, directing sales and marketing at the Hyatt Regency and leading properties including Soaltee, Varnavas, and Ramada. Art, however, was always present. Inspired by her mother's glass work, she once painted a lion and posted it on Facebook with no intention of selling it. A stranger asked if it was for sale. "Until then, I didn't even think of it commercially," she recalls. "It was just pure enjoyment." She named a price, it sold. A second piece sold soon after. That was ten years ago.
Her style today is bold and expressive. Layered textures, fluid brushstrokes, and dynamic fields of colour evoke mood and movement without being tied to a fixed subject. Many of her abstract works have no single orientation; collectors can hang them as they wish, turning each piece into a dialogue between the painting and the space it enters.
The Covid years proved pivotal. During lockdown, she was producing nearly twenty canvases a month, sharing them online and finding an audience that suddenly had both the time and the desire to invest in art. Her first solo exhibition at Siddhartha Art Gallery followed: 45 works displayed, 42 sold. "I was very nervous," she admits. "Art is like taking off your clothes in public. It's internal and intimate. You don't know how people will respond." The response, she says, changed her. "They were taking pieces of my life back to their homes. That felt beautiful."
Since then, she has held five solo exhibitions in Nepal and expanded internationally. She has exhibited in Qatar, where she also launched a line of pashminas printed with her artwork, selling out repeatedly, and participated in the Indian Art Festival in Mumbai as the first Nepali artist to exhibit there. "People are surprised to see someone from Nepal," she says simply. "But I'm getting very good feedback."
Her intention remains clear. "I try to make work that feels calming, something people can return home to after the world has exhausted them." At the same time, she resists repetition. "I don't want to be known for just one thing. For me, art is about exploring myself. People should also have the chance to see different pieces and find themselves in them."
This exhibition brought together beloved earlier series, Butterfly, Peacock, Paradise, Dandelions, Prithvi, alongside three new collections for 2026: A Thousand Gentle Mornings, which welcomed visitors at the entrance; Monsoon Dreams, described as "a love story between the sky and the earth"; and Amrit Dhara, inspired by the idea of divine nectar descending upon the world. Several works, including a large colourful piece priced at two and a half lakhs, were booked even before opening night.
When asked what she hopes visitors carry with them, she does not overcomplicate the answer. "When someone tells me they felt something, that's a victory," she says. "That's the whole objective."
Sharing the gallery walls is Chirag Bangdel, whose practice brings a distinctly different texture to the exhibition. A Kathmandu-based visual artist, poet, writer, and filmmaker, Bangdel's career spans more than two decades and over twenty-seven solo exhibitions in Nepal alone. Known primarily for his figurative work, he has also developed an important mixed-media and collage body under his Tattva series, where material, metaphor, and memory intersect.
His work has been exhibited internationally in the Netherlands, France, Germany, Dubai, Pakistan, and Canada. The World Bank in Kathmandu hosted one of his solo exhibitions in 2006 to mark International Women's Day, and his ongoing installation series Experience Red engages with cycles of violence. He is also the Founder President of the South Asian Poetry Festival for Peace and the author of several poetry collections and short fiction, including Mist Around the Stupa.
The centerpiece of In Between Two Worlds, a collaborative work created by Rana and Bangdel, drew particular attention. It set the tone for the exhibition: not a seamless merging of styles, but a conversation between contrasts. Two distinct artistic languages sharing space without losing their individuality.
By the end of the first day, most of the works had already found new homes. For Rana, who still describes exhibiting as an act of courage each time, that outcome matters. "Art is supposed to make different people feel different things," she says. At In Between Two Worlds, it clearly did.