Vivan Sundaram: A Deep Breadth
No Indian artist has excelled across as wide a range of mediums and styles as Vivan Sundaram did. He made each new form his own with such confidence that that a viewer might assume he had worked in that mode for years. Where a wide variety of approaches is often associated with shallowness or artistic dilettantism, Sundaram鈥檚 practice demonstrated consistent assurance, a deep breadth.
Sundaram was primarily associated with two Indian art historical moments or movements: the politically engaged narrative figuration which emerged in the 1970s and the shift away from the easel towards installation and media art which kicked off in the 1990s. Although committed to ideas of political agency expressed through figuration, he produced a large body of paintings and drawings that contain no figures, or at least no dominant ones. They are not abstract works but rather compositions in which human presence is implied rather than depicted. Vivan Sundaram: A Deep Breadth focuses on this aspect of his oeuvre.
The oldest exhibit is an impressionist view of a church from his student days. The architectural theme continues in an untitled painting from the Jaisalmer series of the mid-1960s in which he blends indigenous and modernist idioms. We move indoors with Blood Bath, a 1975 oil first displayed as part of his solo show The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie which took its title from a film by the surrealist master Luis Bu帽uel. The composition of Blood Bath feels cinematic, with its distorted wide-angle view of the bathtub. The red bathwater could be a commentary on the exploitation that undergirds luxurious lifestyles.
Sundaram was an ardent film lover, and took a course in cinema studies in London in the late 1960s. He closely studied the French director Alain Resnais鈥檚 feature film Muriel as part of a student project and was deeply influenced by the same director鈥檚 Night and Fog, a documentary about the Auschwitz extermination camp and the Holocaust more broadly. A visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the late 1980s led to a series of brooding drawings in charcoal titled Long Night which combined direct experience with echoes of the imagery of Night and Fog. It is worth remembering that the artist had a familial connection with European Jewry, his maternal grandmother having been Hungarian-Jewish although she brought up her daughters as Christians.
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No Indian artist has excelled across as wide a range of mediums and styles as Vivan Sundaram did. He made each new form his own with such confidence that that a viewer might assume he had worked in that mode for years. Where a wide variety of approaches is often associated with shallowness or artistic dilettantism, Sundaram鈥檚 practice demonstrated consistent assurance, a deep breadth.
Sundaram was primarily associated with two Indian art historical moments or movements: the politically engaged narrative figuration which emerged in the 1970s and the shift away from the easel towards installation and media art which kicked off in the 1990s. Although committed to ideas of political agency expressed through figuration, he produced a large body of paintings and drawings that contain no figures, or at least no dominant ones. They are not abstract works but rather compositions in which human presence is implied rather than depicted. Vivan Sundaram: A Deep Breadth focuses on this aspect of his oeuvre.
The oldest exhibit is an impressionist view of a church from his student days. The architectural theme continues in an untitled painting from the Jaisalmer series of the mid-1960s in which he blends indigenous and modernist idioms. We move indoors with Blood Bath, a 1975 oil first displayed as part of his solo show The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie which took its title from a film by the surrealist master Luis Bu帽uel. The composition of Blood Bath feels cinematic, with its distorted wide-angle view of the bathtub. The red bathwater could be a commentary on the exploitation that undergirds luxurious lifestyles.
Sundaram was an ardent film lover, and took a course in cinema studies in London in the late 1960s. He closely studied the French director Alain Resnais鈥檚 feature film Muriel as part of a student project and was deeply influenced by the same director鈥檚 Night and Fog, a documentary about the Auschwitz extermination camp and the Holocaust more broadly. A visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the late 1980s led to a series of brooding drawings in charcoal titled Long Night which combined direct experience with echoes of the imagery of Night and Fog. It is worth remembering that the artist had a familial connection with European Jewry, his maternal grandmother having been Hungarian-Jewish although she brought up her daughters as Christians.
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