Ego Dead is the painting name of Nishant Malhotra, who paints without a plan, letting the paint fall freely and then outlining the figures he finds within the marks, a process he compares to pareidolia. He was raised in the Bay Area and later settled in New York.
Malhotra is the first-generation son of parents who immigrated from India. Hemophilia kept him largely indoors as a child, and he spent that time reading and drawing. Growing up between Hindu and Buddhist temples, he later recognized their dense imagery as a form of encoded information that shaped his approach to painting. He studied design at San Francisco State University and worked a contract job at Google before moving to New York, where he began painting on a rooftop.
He paints with charcoal, oil pastel, oil stick, oil paint, and acrylic, keeping construction lines visible so the history of each work stays present in the finished piece. On some canvases he deliberately paints acrylic over oil, reversing the usual order so the top layer will crack and peel over decades, revealing a different painting underneath. He connects his name to a shift in his meditation practice, from self-expression toward service, saying of the work, “It becomes me serving.”
In 2025 his painting was included in “When Pixels Learned to Samba”, an exhibition organized by SuperRare and the Rio Art Residency.Fellow artist Dave Krugman has described Ego Dead's studio practice as a calling rather than a choice.Malhotra made a collection titled The Disease of More, sixty-nine hand-drawn portraits marking his first portraiture project, set for release with Transient on August 18, 2026.
