One of India’s leading contemporary artists, Vivan Sundaram, has died at the age of 79, his Mumbai gallery has confirmed. He died earlier today in a New Delhi hospital from complications related to a brain haemorrhage. He is survived by his wife, the eminent art historian Geeta Kapur.
Sundaram was born in the northern city of Shimla, Himachal Pradesh in 1943, then in British India. He was the son of Indian civil servant Kalyan Sundaram, the first legal secretary in post-independence India, and Indira Sher-Gil, the sister of Amrita Sher-Gil, the most famous Indian artists of the 20th century. He was educated at the Doon School, before studying at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU) in the 1960s under the famous pedagogue KG Subramanyan, and at the Slade School of Art from the University of London, where his teachers included RB Kitaj, who influenced his early works with elements of kitsch and Pop Art.
by Vivan Sundaram May 68 (1968)
© Tate
For six decades, Sundaram has produced a vast and aesthetically varied body of work that includes painting, sculpture, photography, digital art and room-spanning installations – according to his gallery, Chemould Prescott Road, Sundaram has been the first installation artist in India. While his works are bound by style or theme, they find in common a deep and sustained concern for militant and social issues in India and around the world. His early works, such as painting May 68 (1968), held in the Tate collection, refers to the civil unrest that broke out in Paris during the May 1968 protests – an incident which greatly influenced the young Sundaram and prompted him to set up a commune in London where he lived until 1970. On his return to India in 1971, he worked with groups of artists and students to organize events and demonstrations, especially during the years of Indira Gandhi’s emergency.
His later life, spent largely in Delhi and Mumbai, saw him pursue a successful career in the Indian arts community, helping to promote the country’s art scene on the world stage and galvanizing it around social issues. In 2003, a year after the 2002 Gujarat riots that saw communal violence tear across India, Sundaram took part in a group exhibition at the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust in New Delhi, of which he was one of the trustees. founders. Here he showed two sculptures, Mausoleum (1993) and gun carriage (1995), which represented a victim of the Mumbai riots.
These two works were part of his room-sized installation Memorial (1993-2014), created in response to violent conflict between Hindu and Muslim groups in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the early 1990s. Composed of a number of small individually titled parts, the work forms a tomb Memorial for an unknown victim of the civil conflict surrounding the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 by Hindu extremists.
by Vivan Sundaram Sisters with two daughters (2001)
One of Sundaram’s best-known works is Cover of ‘Amrita’ (2001-2005), in which photos of his family taken by his grandfather Umrao Singh Sher-Gil between 1904 and 1940 are remixed and pasted together via Photoshop, to create paintings that distort space, time and, by therefore, reality. Highlighting his aunt Amrita, the work was described by Sundaram at the time as a “photo-dream-love-play”.
Sundaram was one of 30 artists to present new work at the 15th edition of the Sharjah Biennale (through June 11), where his photomontage installation Six stations of a continued life (2022) is exposed. “okwui [Enwezor’s] proposal suggests a dynamic yet recursive narrative in an ethically responsible way,” Sundaram said of the project. “I present a project based on photography, Six stations of a continued life (2022), a choreography of bodies that have suffered violence, experienced incarceration and experienced mourning. The sixth “station” signifies a journey grounded in history and repeated with militant determination. »
by Vivan Sundaram 100,000 releases, ‘Motor oil and charcoal on paper’, (1990–1991) © Vivan Sundaram. Courtesy of the artist
Sundaram is represented by Chemould Prescott Road in Mumbai and Photoink and Vadehra Art Gallery, both in Delhi. Shireen Gandhy, manager of Chemould Prescott Road, says The arts journal: “To say that Vivan took risks is an understatement. Often, artists are considered to have paved the way so to speak, giving courage to others to walk this path. Vivan was that when it came to installation art – it was a new term, quite unknown to the contemporary world.”
“Vivan’s Marxist ideology, his sense of justice and his strong politics intersected in his artistic practice. I will never forget his motor oil drawings of 1991-92, after the Gulf War. C t was perhaps the first time he came out of mediums like charcoal, pastels or oils These were large works on paper made with motor oil – the background of each work with trays of oil which looked like a flow of blood (and less like an oil spill).The exhibition held in two public spaces – the Shridharani in Delhi and the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay (presented by Chemould) – was a revelation for a lot. My strongest memory was the presence of students during not only the exhibition, but also during the installation of the exhibition. I think it was a moment to count both for us in as gallerists and for the public to see the works seen in this courageous way.”
Sundaram’s work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions and international biennials, including two retrospectives at Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Kiran Nadar Museum in New Delhi. His work has been exhibited at the Tate Modern, the Queens Museum of Art in New York and the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan. The artist has published over 18 books, including Making Strange, Trash, Amrita Sher Gil: A Family of 20th Century Indian Artists, Cover of Amrita And Vivan Sundaram is not a photographer.
Vivan Sundaram; born Shimla on May 28, 1943; married in 1985 Geeta Kapur; died in New Delhi on March 29, 2023.
