In the mid 1960’s, a Public Works Department employee began collecting stones from the Shivalik Hills along with discarded ceramics and scraps from the nearby villages. From these fragments, he began to construct an imaginative world of his own making. Piece by piece and rock by rock, this private vision took shape as a garden of reclaimed dreams. Conceived and built in secret, the project expanded gradually over the years until it was eventually discovered. What emerged was the extraordinary Rock Graden of Chandigarh, a monumental environment of sculptures, pathways, architectural follies fashioned entirely from salvaged materials. And at the heart of this remarkable achievement was Nek Chand Saini. 

Born in 1924, Nek Chand joined the Chandigarh Capital Project on October 10, 1950. In the 60s he began to occupy a piece of land at the northern edge of the city near the PWD store, which provided him with ample access to the materials, space and labour necessary to initiate this project. He also occasionally sourced stones from the nearby riverbeds of Sukhna Cho, Patiala Rao and the Ghaggar often travelling there on his bicycle. As the modernist city of Chandigarh steadily rose around him, Nek Chand channelled his fascination with natural rocks, stones and other found objects into the creation of an artistic landscape, developed outside the formal frameworks of the city’s planning process. 

The sculptures presented here reflect Nek Chand’s remarkable ability to transform ordinary and discarded materials into evocative works of art. Drawing upon local folk traditions, memory and intuitive understanding of form, he made figures that appear both timeless and deeply rooted in the everyday life. Carved and assembled, these sculptures emphasize gesture, rhythm and collective presence. Human forms emerge from stone with a quiet dignity, their simplified forms inviting the viewers to focus on movement, character and perhaps the relationship between figures. The surface evidently retains a tactile quality that speaks to the artists direct engagement with the material, revealing traces of labour, improvisation and care.  Rather than functioning as isolated objects, Nek Chand’s sculptures seek to reveal a larger imaginative movement. They evoke communities and a shared cultural narrative, blurring the boundaries between sculpture, landscape and storytelling. Creating a sense of belonging, Nek Chand’s sculptures represent the transformation of humble materials into vibrant visual language. 

This exhibition throws light on Nek Chand’s enduring vision: an art practice that nurtures resourcefulness, collective memory, inventive spirit and the creative potential embedded within the everyday. Through these works, the exhibition celebrates an act of radical reuse that transformed waste into wonder and imagination into a living monument.