Important Notice

Hema Upadhyay combined painting and photography in her art to examine themes of loss, disillusionment, and displacement in contemporary urban life. Her work also grapples with broader issues of security and survival in today’s violent world. Having moved from Baroda, where she was born in 1972, to the sprawling city of Mumbai, these themes resonate with her personal experiences, giving her work an autobiographical layer. This is evident in her... Hema Upadhyay combined painting and photography in her art to examine themes of loss, disillusionment, and displacement in contemporary urban life. Her work also grapples with broader issues of security and survival in today’s violent world. Having moved from Baroda, where she was born in 1972, to the sprawling city of Mumbai, these themes resonate with her personal experiences, giving her work an autobiographical layer. This is evident in her use of self-portraits, which she integrates as collaged photographs on her painted surfaces.

Explaining the dissonance she experienced on moving to Mumbai, Upadhyay says, “The city was just too difficult to grasp. It looked so easy from the outside. But once I became a part of it, the process of wanting to be accepted, needing to understand the body language and attitudes of the people and the city and dealing with the often- hostile environment. There was a fear of rejection. A fact every migrant has to face.” (as quoted in Amrita Gupta Singh, “Can Flowers Say it All?”, Artconcerns, 2006, online)

Nancy Adajania explains, “Upadhyay places photographed cutouts of herself onto painted backdrops, inviting viewers to question the ‘real’ environment in which the photos were originally taken. This environment is none other than Bombay, her adopted city-a mayapuri, where space is reduced to a commodity, and alternative forms of space are wiped out. The city is marked by a landscape of sprawling slums and looming skyscrapers, where pavements become homes for many, and bulldozers bring their destruction. Here, citizens’ rights are traded in secret, and basic necessities are restricted under the guise of globalization. In this city, real spaces are constructed from artificial materials, and imagined spaces become concrete realities.” (“When the Body Meets the City”, The Hindu, December 3, 2001)

In works such as the present lot, the artist places miniscule figures-likely self- portraits-amid large, blooming flowers. The decorative landscapes on which Upadhyay places her photographic cutouts stand as symbolic opposites of the chaotic urban environment. They represent a world that is still, open, beautiful, and free-everything the mega-city is not.

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