Alwar Balasubramaniam

Bala’s interest in art has been alive since his early adolescence and he earned a BFA from the Government College of Arts, Chennai in 1995. He began his formal training with a focus in printmaking and continued to take courses after his graduation at the Edinburgh Printers Workshop (EPW),[1] the Universität fär angewandte Kunst Wien, Vienna where his early work focused on prints and paintings. His work took a turn after his time at the MacDowell Colony residency in Massachusetts. It was here that he ban working increasingly in sculpture and installation in the early 2000s. He was attracted to its multi-dimensionality and has since gained much recognition as a sculptor.

Bala’s first solo exhibition in the United States took place at the Talwar Gallery in New York City in 2002.[2] On display were sculptures cast from his own body, monoprints, and a heat sensitive work that revealed itself only at a certain temperature. Bala’s works begin with a questioning of perception and end with a new understanding of what we previously knew. He handles his strong conceptual groundwork with a playfulness in execution. He has shown his works at the Talwar Galleries in New York and New Delhi throughout his career.

Other notable showings include Sk(in) at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.[3] For this exhibition, Bala created a massive steel sculpture to sit outside. It is not solid, but composed of delicately welded steel pieces that create an image suggestive of a tree trunk, or the human heart itself. The interior component to the piece engages with the walls in three parts, Wound, Hidden Sight, and Untitled. The works all focus on the reversibility of skin, its position on the exterior of a body or and object yet it points to the interior and depth within. Bala has also been involved with notable group exhibitions such as the 50th Anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Contemplating the Void in 2010[4] and On Line at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010-2011.[5] These highly respected museums invited artists from around the world who were known for their innovation and transformative artworks.

Bala’s works have been exhibited in museums, art festivals, and galleries worldwide, including Mori Art Museum, Japan;[6] Essl Museum, Austria;[7] 1st Singapore Biennale;[8] École des Beaux Arts, Paris, France;[9] National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia;[10] and the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia.[11]

Bala prefers to be known simply as “a person who creates art.” He focuses on what needs to be expressed and the materials best suited to do so, rather than defining himself by a material and creating work accordingly.

Similarly, Bala's work, unlike that of many of his contemporaries, largely eschews references to contemporary social or geographic realities – a fact that many critics cite as the reason for his belated international acclaim, especially in comparison with artists whose "Indianness" appears more overtly in their work.[12] Bala's work, by contrast, is centered on the body and its relationship to the material world, focusing especially on the intangible elements – light, air, shadow – that structure physical experience.[13] Bala’s artwork represents the questions that he asks about himself and the particularities of our world. He asks questions about the subjectivity of our perception, our faith or disbelief in the invisible, and the stance our bodies have in relationship to our selves and our world. His artwork also provides certain understandings of these questions. He plays with our perceptions, our preconceptions and others us a new way of looking at things. In a similar way, many of Bala's works deal with Energy – that invisible yet absolutely fundamental animating force of life. While his earlier works often referred to energy in a visually symbolic manner, eventually energy became more of a latent presence in Bala's work – a force connoted rather than denoted, known only by its effects. The dynamic installations of Energy Field (2009) or Link (2009), for example, physically manifest the presence of forms of energy, even while masking their origin – confusing and teasing the viewer and underscoring the myriad non-visible forces at work in the physical world.

Often using his own body as a basis for his sculptures, Bala engages in a profound, but not humourless, investigation into the metaphysics of selfhood.[14] Many of his sculptural series that have included casts from himself, focusing especially on the skin as the literal and metaphorical boundary that separates the inside from the outside, the seen from the hidden, the self from the exterior world. In an early work, Self in progress (2002), for example, a life-sized seated figure cast from his own body, appears rooted within a wall. The figure is caught midway at this transitional threshold, entering from one side of the wall and emerging from another, with a non-visible head apparently stuck inside the wall. The sculpture seems an audacious pronouncement of the will of man, which grants the ability to saturate matter and makes nothing beyond reach or inert. For a passing moment, there seems to exist a connectedness between all things animate and inanimate; the art and the space it inhabits become one. As the artist once remarked, "We usually seek clarity in details while the entire picture may be blurred. To me life is not about clear moments but seeking clarity in life as a whole.

[15]

Solo Exhibitions

2019

Talwar Gallery: Becoming Nature, New York, NY, US[16]

2018

Talwar Galley, Liquid Lake Mountain, New Delhi, India[17]

2016

Talwar Gallery, Rain in the midnight, New York, NY, US[18]

2015

Talwar Gallery, layers of wind, lines of time, New York, NY, US[19]

2012

Talwar Gallery, New York, NY, US[20]

Talwar Gallery, Nothing From My Hands, New Delhi, Inidia[21]

The Phillips Collection, Sk(in), Washington DC, US

2009

Talwar Gallery, (In)between, New Delhi, India[22]

2007

Talwar Gallery, New York, NY, US

Talwar Gallery, (In)visible, New Delhi, India[23]

2005

Van Every/Smith Galleries, Unfixed Being, Davidson, North Carolina, US[24]

2004

Talwar Gallery, Into Thin Air, New York, NY, US[25]

2002

Fundacio pilar I Joan Miro, Traces, Majoca, Spain[26]

Talwar Gallery, New York, NY

2000

Association Mouvement Art Contemporain, Chamalieres, France

The British Council, New Delhi, Inidia

1999

Die Kleine Galerie, Vienna, Austria

Carloz Ionzano Gallery, Cadaques, Spain

Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop, UK

1998

Taller Galleria, Cadaques, Spain

Art Inc., New Delhi, India

Selected Group Exhibitions

2019

Arvind Indigo Museum, Alchemy: Explorations in Indigo, Ahmedabad, India[27]

2018

FRAC Lorraine, You Remind Me of Someone, Metz, France

2015

The Phillips Collection, Intersections, Washington DC, US

2014

Seattle Art Museum, City Dwellers, Seattle, Washington, US

2013

Columbus College of Art and Design, WALL, Columbus, OH, US[28]

2012

18th Biennale of Sydney, all our relations, Sydney, Australia[29][30]

Montclair Art Museum, Look Now, Montclair, NJ, US

2011

National Portrait Gallery, Beyond the Self, Canberra, Australia, and travel to

McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, Australia, : Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Australia

Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Time Unfolded, New Delhi, India

2010

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), On Line, New York, NY, US[31]

Guggenheim Museum, Contemplating the Void, New York, NY, US

2009

Devi Art Foundation, Poddar Collection, Where in the World, New Delhi, India[32]

2008

Mori Art Museum, Chalo! India: A New Era of Indian Art, Tokyo Japan and travel to

National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea

Essl Museum, Klosterneurburg, Wien, Austria

2006

Singapore Biennale, Belief, Singapore

2005

University of Massachusetts, Transition and Transformation, Amherst, MA, US[33]

Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Indian Summer, Paris, France

Talwar Gallery, desi(re), New York, NY, US[34]

2001

8th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo, Egypt

Finding the Center at the Margins, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, India

6th International Biennale of Drawing and Graphic Arts, Gyor, Hungary

2000

Aar Paar, Exchange exhibition between India and Pakistan[35]

International Print Triennial, Cracow, Poland

3rd International Triennial of Graphic Art, Bitola, Macedonia

6th International Biennial of Miniature Art, Yugoslavia

1st Cheju International Prints Art Festival, Korea

5th Triennial Mondiale D'Estampes Petit Format, Chamalieres, France

4th Muestra Latino Americana International Miniprint, Argentina

1999

12th Norwegian International Print Triennial, Norway

Premio International Biella, Italy

10th International Exhibition for Small Graphics, Lodz, Poland

4th British International Miniature Print Exhibition, UK

1998

1st International Print Triennial, Kanagawa, Japan

7th International Triennial of Prints and Drawings, Vaasa, Finland

2nd International Triennial of Graphic Art, Labyrinth, Prague, Czech Republic

1995- Bachelor of Fine Arts, Government College of Arts, Madras, India 1998- EPW (Printmaking) Edinburgh, UK 1999- Universität fur Angewandte Kunste (Printmaking) Wien, Austria

2008

Featured Speaker at TED Conference, Mysore, India

Guest Lecturer, Department of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

2006

Sanskriti Award, India

2001

Kunstlerdorf's fellowship, SChoppingen, Germany

Fundacio pilar I Joan Miro's Award, Spain

1999

UNESCO - ASCHBERG Bursaries for Artists in Residency at Vienna, Austria

1998

Residency at the MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, United States

Grapheion Review Award in International Print Biennial, Prague, Czech Republic

1997

The Charles Wallace India Trust Arts Fellowship Award, United Kingdom

Junior Fellowship from Government of India

Grand prize in 4th Bharat Bhavan International Print Biennial, Bhopal, India

The Charles Wallace India Trust Arts Fellowship Award, United Kingdom

1996

2nd Egyptian International Print Triennial Award, Giza, Egypt

1995

3rd Sapporo International Print Biennial Sponsor Award, Sapporo, Japan

Research Grant Award from Lalit Kala Academy, India

2009- (IN)BETWEEN. With an essay by Deepak Talwar, 2009.[36][37]

2007- (In)visible. With an essay by Sharmini Pereira, 2007.[38]

2005- Transition and Transformation. University Gallery, Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts. With essays by Loretta Yarlow and Deepak Talwar, 2005.[39] |}

• Artforum, "Alwar Balasubramaniam," April 2015
• Artforum, "Critics Pick: Alwar Balasubramaniam," May 2016
• The New Yorker, "Alwar Balasubramaniam," June 2016
• "A. Balasubramaniam Profile,Interview and Artworks"
• The Pioneer, "Space Beneath the Skin", March 2012
• The Sunday Guardian, "Sculpting the unseen", March 2012
• Harper's Bazaar, "'Do you know what you see?' The art of A. Balasubramaniam", January 2012
• TEDIndia, "Alwar Balasubramaniam: Art of substance and absence", September 2010
• MoMA, Behind the Scenes: On Line, A. Balasubramaniam
• New York Times Review, On Line, MoMA, December 2011
• A. Balasubramaniam is represented by Talwar Gallery,
• A. Balasubramaniam on artnet
• Time Out New Delhi
• Artinfo
• New York Times – (Desi)re
• New York Times Review – May 2002