VIVAN SUNDARAM: A DEEP BREADTH
April 10 - May 17 , 2025
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’s 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 Buñuel. 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’s feature film Muriel as part of a student project and was deeply influenced by the same director’s 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.
Sundaram had begun working in charcoal on paper before his visit to the Nazi death camps, creating a series of dystopian landscapes in response to catastrophes such as the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown of 1986. The Long Night drawings — three of which find place in A Deep Breadth — feel like a natural evolution from these earlier works.
The Gulf War of 1991 precipitated by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait set off a new chain of environmental disasters, with Iraqi forces setting alight oil wells and dumping petroleum into the Persian Gulf in an attempt to thwart American landing craft. Sundaram began a fruitful engagement with engine oil as an artistic medium in response to the conflict in the Middle East. The two drawings from this period in the show are somewhat uncharacteristic in featuring animals, a rare subject for him. The intricate Mesopotamian Drawing – 1 has a cheetah or leopard at its centre surrounded by a chaotic spread of barely discernible figures and objects.
Although frequently inspired by specific events, the artist also concerned himself with the larger arc of history. In the course of the 1980s, he grew fascinated by the idea of journeys, using the boat and ship in numerous richly metaphorical paintings and installations in the following years. He crafted lyrical pastels drawing on diverse sources including memories of past travels, European seaports like Hamburg, where his sister lived, and a book about Chinese seafaring from which he borrowed certain images. Two of these pastels feature in the exhibition.
India changed course in the 1990s through a phased liberalisation of the economy that took place in the shadow of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Sundaram grew interested in these years in exploring found materials, urban detritus, and consumer goods. A scroll-like collage made during a visit to Hong Kong for a workshop in the year of that erstwhile British colony’s handover to China hints at these new investigations with its use of found materials such as small, kitschy stickers.
Rounding off the selection are doodle-like drawings from 2005, made as part of an exhibition titled living it. out. in. delhi, dashed off quickly and sold cheap as a way of questioning ideas about consumption and value. Their continued circulation two decades later adds a layer of meaning and perhaps irony to the original impulse.
This compact grouping of a prolific artist’s work gives us some insight into Vivan Sundaram’s concerns and provides a hint of the scale of his achievement.
Girish Shahane
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