Kartikey Sharma

I am an Indian muralist and multidisciplinary artist whose practice sits at the intersection of resilience, street culture, and storytelling. I started out painting college walls with borrowed spray cans and no formal training — learning directly from the street, from scale, and from the constant negotiation with public space.

Over the past decade , that curiosity evolved into a full-time practice. Today, I create large-scale murals that blend surreal architecture, metaphor, motion, and personal narrative. Paper planes, portals, shifting worlds, and transforming structures appear again and again in my work — symbols of persistence, escape, and reinvention.

My journey has been shaped by surviving cancer twice and rebuilding life after a bone-marrow transplant. I wrote about this in my book It’s Not About Cancer, and those experiences continue to shape the urgency and honesty in my work. For me, painting walls isn’t decoration — it’s a way of saying that stories deserve to be seen.

Community is central to everything I paint. I respond to local histories, lived experiences, and the people who share space with the wall. A campus-wide mural for Dynamatic Technologies is one such example — translating the company’s industrial and aerospace legacy into a narrative that honored its artisans and workforce, and was described by the CEO as “profoundly transformative.”

I’ve painted across India, Sri Lanka, Dubai, and San Francisco, collaborating with neighborhoods, institutions, and public spaces while staying rooted in the spirit of street practice.