Vivan Sundaram

Vivan Sundaram ( born 1943 in Shimla ) is an Indian artist. He is a nephew of the famous artist Amrita Sher -Gil.

Life

Vivan Sundaram was born in 1943 in Shimla. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara and completed mid-1960s at RB Kitaj at the Slade School of Fine Art in London postgraduate studies. While studying in England and Germany, he was influenced in work style and artistic way of seeing by the Marxist idea of the '68 student movement. In 1970 he returned to India. He was one of the founders of the organization in 1989 SAHMAT ( Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust ), a cultural- political forum of artists and intellectuals against right-wing ideologies.

Vivan Sundaram is one of the most important contemporary Indian artists. He lives with his wife, the art critic Geeta Kapur, in Delhi.

Work

During his early years as an artist Sundaram created figurative paintings. From the mid- 1980s he turned increasingly to art genres mixed media and installation, because he wanted to overcome the limitations that impose a framed two-dimensional work of art to the artist. He was one of the first Indian artists who created installations. About 1990 he gave up painting entirely devoted to the artistic expressions of installation, photography including photomontage and video art.

Sundaram's art focuses primarily political and social issues. So he faced in his series TRASH the viewer with the subject of waste. He often works at the interface between art and architecture, which he increasingly focuses on issues arising from the urban development of our time.

A contrast and a complement to the artistic exploration of his family history. The oil painting The Sher -Gil Family ( 1983-84 ) was one of the last works with which he took leave of the painting. In the picture his aunt Amrita Sher -Gil, his mother Indira, his grandmother Marie Antoinette and in the background his grandfather Umrao Singh are " a collage of fragments gathered ." Re -take of ' Amrita ' is a series of photomontages in which he used black and white family photos of his grandfather, Umrao Singh. Sundaram digitized the old photographs and put them back together to the family history to re-tell in this way.

Since the mid- 1970s he also employed as a curator, editor and archivist with the history of the family Sher -Gil. This includes the edition of the letters of Amrita Sher -Gil.

In January 2010, the non-profit organization Asia Art Archive began with the digitization of the archive of Vivan Sundaram and his Mrs. Geeta Kapur.