Important Notice

Born in Baroda in 1972, Hema Upadhyay’s works combine painting and photography to raise the issue of loss, disenchantment and dislocation in modern urban life, and, more generally, questions of security and survival in today’s violent world. Moving from Baroda to the megalopolis of Mumbai, these are issues that the artist has encountered herself, lending a note of autobiography to her work. It is not surprising, then, that the photographs she... Born in Baroda in 1972, Hema Upadhyay’s works combine painting and photography to raise the issue of loss, disenchantment and dislocation in modern urban life, and, more generally, questions of security and survival in today’s violent world. Moving from Baroda to the megalopolis of Mumbai, these are issues that the artist has encountered herself, lending a note of autobiography to her work. It is not surprising, then, that the photographs she collages onto her painted surfaces are self-portraits.

As Nancy Adajania explains, “Upadhyay superimposes photographed cutouts of herself onto her painted landscapes. This pictorial conceit makes the viewer speculate about the ‘real’ environment in which she was photographed in the first place. This ‘real’ environment belongs to her city of adoption, Bombay. A mayapuri, where space is legitimised only as real estate, and any other definition of space is bulldozed out of existence. Where the landscape proliferates with duplex slums and sky-scraping monstrosities. Where the pavement is home to most people and the bulldozer their ultimate annihilation. Where citizens' rights are sold in black, and basic entitlements are curtailed in the name of globalisation. Here, real space is built of fake concrete and fictive spaces concretise into the real” (“When the body meets the city”, The Hindu, December 3, 2001).

The decorative landscapes on which the artist pastes these cutout photographs are paeans to everything that the mega-city is not – still, spacious, beautiful and free. Here, Upadhyay juxtaposes oversized images of flowers with those of matches, a motif she has returned to in her recent sculptural work, to cathartically comment on romance and violence, creation and destruction, and the tenuous line that separates them.

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