Melbourne artist Santosh Mahale is back home after a run of exhibitions in San Francisco, the city where his signature Birdseye painting style first took shape nearly two decades ago. The return carried more weight than most overseas shows. Between 2007 and 2012, Mahale lived in San Francisco while working in consulting, quietly painting the places around him. It was there that the visual language he would eventually become known for began to emerge.
Mahale said he had recently completed a series of back-to-back exhibitions, including a major showing in San Francisco, before returning to Melbourne for what he described as “a relatively quieter period” focused on commissions.
Spread across multiple venues during March 2026, Birdseye San Francisco revisited the city through the aerial compositions that have become his trademark, tracing neighbourhoods, landmarks, hills, transport systems, and local wildlife. The exhibition catalogue described the return as more than a professional milestone. “This also marks a return to an old home, a place where the creative spark for Santosh’s artistic subject was shaped nearly two decades ago,” it noted. “Returning now, these works are informed by deep affection and cherished memories, inviting viewers to slow down, look closer, and reflect on their own connection to the city.”
“Through this Birdseye view, I bring together architecture, landmarks, birds, and natural elements to reflect what makes San Francisco’s neighborhoods so distinct, layered, and alive”
One of the centrepieces, San Francisco – The Living Grid, captures the city through topographic forms, transport icons, steep streets, and neighbourhood references ranging from Chinatown to North Beach. Four bird species appear across the work, including the cherry-headed conures that have become an unexpected symbol of San Francisco’s urban ecology. A second work, San Francisco – The Neighborhood City, maps more than seventy neighbourhoods into a single visual composition. “Through this Birdseye view, I bring together architecture, landmarks, birds, and natural elements to reflect what makes San Francisco’s neighborhoods so distinct, layered, and alive,” Mahale said.
The trip also brought an unexpected personal moment. Mahale reconnected with the family of an elderly man who had written to him in 2008 after seeing his early work and encouraged him to take art more seriously. He narrowly missed meeting the man himself in person. The experience became one of the more emotional parts of the San Francisco journey, and it reinforced something that runs through his practice more broadly: that places are shaped as much by human encounters and memory as by geography or architecture.
That instinct was already evident in Birdseye Victoria, his exhibition at Montsalvat’s Barn Gallery over the Christmas and summer period. Working across the full breadth of the state rather than a single city, Mahale explored Victoria’s cities, coastlines, birds, and heritage spaces. The exhibition also featured works by Melbourne artist Mia Emily Freeman, whose more intimate studies of birdlife sat alongside Mahale’s sweeping aerial views.
His interest in cities under pressure appears across several bodies of work. His large-scale installation Greener and Bluer Bangalore, for instance, explored the expansion of Bangalore’s municipal boundaries while reflecting on the pressures facing lakes, heritage spaces, and urban ecology. Whether painting Melbourne’s churches, the neighbourhood grids of San Francisco, or the shrinking green spaces of Bangalore, his works often function as layered visual essays, moving between the analytical precision of mapping and the emotional pull of belonging.
After months of back-to-back shows, Mahale is now back in Melbourne, working through commissions and settling into a slower rhythm. The practice that began quietly in a San Francisco apartment has grown into one of the more recognisable map-based artistic voices to emerge from Melbourne’s multicultural creative scene. The pace may be gentler at the moment, but the work continues.
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