Pushpamala N. studied sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the M. S. University of Baroda where her professor, artist K. G. Subramanyan (1924-2016), exerted great influence on her works from the 1980s – terracotta busts and reliefs. She perfected her modelling technique until she radically changed the representation of animal and human bodies – mostly female – as seen with The Fool (1984-1985). She paid particular attention to the gestures of increasingly large figures. Through her descriptive realism, her taste for detail and theatricality, and her references to both art history and popular culture, she questions norms with irony and self-mockery. She has exhibited her works in Bangalore, New Dehli – where she participated in the Seven Young Sculptors exhibition in 1985 – and in Mumbai alongside the artist Alex Mathew (1957). In the early 1990s Pushpamala N. questioned the consequences of political and social life in India, before returning to the subject of female identity. Around 1995 she abandoned sculpture for photography and radicalised her method of satire and questioning reality through using her own body.

From her first photographic series, Phantom Lady or Kismet: A Photoromance (1996-1998), to her reflection on the colonial world with her “anthropological” shots from Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000-2004), she constantly summons the Indian collective memory to denounce cultural stereotypes whose codes she modifies and critiques through a meticulous practice of staging and through the use of innumerable references (including cinematographic devices, evocation of film characters, real architectural elements, images and myths taken from classical and popular culture) that allow her to blur genres and multiply levels of interpretation. Surrounded by collaborators, both subject and object, Pushpamala N. is a creator, director and main actor of stories in which humour, melancholy and nostalgia meet, where seriousness arises from the masquerade.