Inside Electric Kiln: Rajan Bijlani’s Home Exhibition of Art, Design, and Elegance

My fascination with Frank Auerbach began early, caught off guard and moved by the immediacy of his brushwork long before I knew more about the depths of his incredible life and oeuvre. His portraits always seemed to breathe, the faces alive not just with paint, but with memory, expression, and presence. The same characteristics marked his landscapes, with an almost palpable mood capturing the bustling atmosphere in the air of North London. Over the years, friendships and conversations deepened my understanding of his wor,k and my admiration for his ability to translate life into textured pigment kept growing. The exhibition “Electric Kiln,” put on by Rajan Bijlani, extended this esteem in yet a new way—and one that you would not expect as you ring the bell to enter the space.

Hosted in the quiet elegance of his home, the historic Fonthill Pottery, a stone’s throw away from where so many of the featured artworks were created, the project is less a conventional show than a refined conversation between art, architecture, and the deeply personal approach to collecting. The residence itself becomes both host and participant in this experience.

Where Refinement and Creative Intuition Meet

From the moment you step inside, you sense that this is not a stage for display. Rajan Bijlani, a property developer by profession, has transformed his home into a sublime setting for works by Emmanuel Cooper, Lucie Rie, and Frank Auerbach, alongside a constellation of mid-century furniture by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret.

It is a home with an artistic memory. Once the studio of potter Emmanuel Cooper, Fonthill Pottery still seems to hum with creative residue. The presence of Cooper’s electric kiln, long since dismantled, lingers in the show’s title and spirit, its power of transformation becoming a guiding homage and metaphor. All the works blaze with life, bound by a shared sense of shaping matter. Cooper, Lucie Rie, and Auerbach, each in their medium—clay, glaze, paint, charcoal—each in a lifelong pursuit of something alive, something profoundly human. They also shared a sensitivity to their geographical place, channelling the surrounding world.

The Custodian of Chandigarh Design

Rajan Bijlani has lived here since 2014, restoring the building with the same delicacy he brings to his curations. Confidence and subtle elegance define each room: chalky walls, pale light pooling across the floors, and furniture that feels less arranged than intuitively placed with the towering, rigorous presence of a sculptural masterpiece. His passion and knowledge of French mid-century design runs deep. In 2004, while still in his twenties, he stumbled upon a cache of Le Corbusier and Jeanneret furniture in India, remnants of the Chandigarh project. He went on to become one of its most thoughtful custodians. Two decades on, he is beginning to release select pieces in a thoughtfully dedicated manner.

An Evening with Auerbach and Lucie Rie

I first visited “Electric Kiln” only a few hours after the works had been installed. That evening, I joined Rajan and a small gathering of friends, collectors, and scholars for dinner. The conversation was lively, but I remember finding my attention drawn again and again to the wall opposite: a magnetic painting titled J.Y.M. Seated (1984). Painted in the lead-up to his presentation at the Venice Biennale that would win him the golden lion, its thick, charged surface seemed to pulse in the light, so vividly that it was almost disarming. The vibrancy of this artwork kept gently interrupting the flow of the lively social rhythm, drawing you to feel its persisting gravity, quietly but insistently.

“All the works blaze with life, bound by a shared sense of shaping matter,”

Lucie Rie’s ceramics, by contrast, offer a more tender restraint, letting the largely unadorned forms to speak. Like Auerbach, who emigrated to Britain from Germany without his parents at just seven years old in 1939, Rie was also in exile, having fled her native Vienna in 1938. In wartime London, when a traditional wood-fired kiln was not an option, she became one of the first artists to use an electric kiln, a pragmatic adaptation that became part of her creative language. Her work embodies a devotion to material, to craft, to a life lived through making. She perfected a technique of sgraffito, incising lines into flaring bowls, mastered the thin delicacy of her ceramics, letting them ooze with clarity, vibrant colours gently bleeding away. Her bronze hues and quivering reflections, the silky sheens and volcanic surfaces, the uniqueness of her rims—all have an irresistible tactile magnetism.

Within the domestic calm of Fonthill Pottery, her vessels feel perfectly at home. As with Auerbach’s richly impastoed paintings, the delicacy of her ceramics resonates against the rigorous geometry and warm, patinated teak surfaces of the furniture from Chandigarh.

Rajan Bijlani Curates a Singular Conversation

As “Electric Kiln” comes to a close, I went to sit down with Rajan Bijlani one more time before the end of this beautiful show. I find myself reluctant to say goodbye. There’s a particular ache that accompanies the end of something so personal, burning steadily from within. A feeling not unlike leaving a conversation that has just begun to open. Bijlani’s project rivals the polish and ambition of major institutions, yet what makes it so special is precisely what institutions rarely offer: intimacy, warmth, and a sense of belonging.