Artist Profile :: Hema Upadhyay

21 January 2009

In partnership with Gallery Nature Morte, one of India’s premiere contemporary art spaces since 1997, Phillips de Pury & Company presents The Audience and the Eavesdropper: New Art from India & Pakistan, featuring 10 of the most influential and soughtafter artists working in India and Pakistan. The exhibition opens in London on 26 November 2008 and in New York on 28 January 2009.

Through 15 December 2008:
Phillips de Pury & Company
Howick Place London SW1P 1BB

From 28 January - 14 February 2009:
Phillips de Pury & Company
450 West 15 Street New York NY

Hema Upadhyay reflects upon issues of gender, class and dislocation in her art. Combining dissonant elements including painting, sculpture, collage and photography, her works evoke a sense of transient nostalgia belonging to no specific place or time but suggesting many. Upadhyay’s paintings are usually characterized by the inclusion of small collaged photographic self-portraits. Miniaturizing images of herself in various positions, she inserts them into her allegorical landscapes allowing them to interact with the decorative and fictive environments she creates. The de-monumentalization of her visage in these works results in an anti-fetishized version of the female body and her portraits are like records of her meanderings through these spaces.

Hema Upadhyay, Killing Site - II, 2008

The artist repeatedly utilizes patterned surfaces which quote from Indian spiritual iconography and traditional textile design. Upadhyay’s marriage of these surfaces with her own image is meant to touch on themes of migration and displacement in South Asia and also reflects upon the existential plight of the artist as solo creator, for even in her many incarnations she remains the sole inhabitant of her artistic worlds. In her newest works, Upadhyay introduces an additional layer to the works in the sculptural element of Mumbai shanty-towns at the base of the sculpture (or, inverted, as a canopy to the paintings). Her use of shading and her depiction of smoke-like elements give the impression that the villages are on fire or in the claws of destruction, a theme is elucidated by the titles, Killing Site I-IV.

Violence and its traditional co-existence with beauty within India seem to preoccupy the artist these days. Five large sculptural works are grand chandeliers made entirely out of unused wooden matchsticks. The gloriously intricate structures seem on the verge of a rapid conflagration, still with us only because of magic or luck. The metaphors in Upadhyay’s work certainly point to the rising sectarian intelorance to be found everywhere in India today, and to the perpetrators and innocent victims caught up in such forces.

Hema Upadhyay lives and works in Mumbai, India. For sale enquiries and more information about the artist please contact Veronica Collins, vcollins@phillipsdepury.com