The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Renowned Indian artist Vivan Sundaram passed away in Delhi on Wednesday (March 29) morning. He was 79.
Sundaram worked with different media – painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, installation and video art – during his career. His work has been showcased in museums and exhibitions across the world.
In a 2018 article on a retrospective exhibition of Sundaram’s work, Chitra Padmanabhan wrote:
“The popular image of an explorer is invariably that of a swashbuckling figure roaming the ends of the Earth to discover its well-kept secrets. Some would say an artist is an explorer too – especially one who seeks to re-imagine the world in radically new ways, enabling the viewer to see disquieting truths usually masked by civilisational hubris.
In over 50 years of art practice, Vivan Sundaram has been just that kind of artist-explorer. His ceaseless experimentation with new mediums, materials and forms, so as to engage with his immediate context and the ebb and flow of the world, marks him out as a singular presence among his contemporaries. As does his passion to trace the shadow of the past – history – over the present through the idea of the archive and memory.
This is borne out by the grand sweep of the artist’s first-ever retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi, titled ‘Step inside and you are no longer a stranger’. Curated by Roobina Karode, it showcases around 180 works, including paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, photo-montages and regal installations. From his earliest pop kitsch paintings (1965-68) and drawings (1970s) to the latest collaborative installation, ‘Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946’ (2017), the retrospective marks the shifts in Sundaram’s artistic practice – moving away from the preeminence of painting, painterly material and the wall, towards the conceptual rigour of installation art in the 1990s, exemplifying a paradigm shift in Indian contemporary art.“
After graduating from the Doon School, Sundaram was trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, and at Slade School of Fine Arts in London.
Sundaram was a founding member of the Kassuli Art Center, the Journal of Arts & Ideas, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), and a managing trustee of the Sher-Gil Sundaram Arts Foundation (Amrita Sher-Gil was his cousin).
At the ongoing Kochi Biennale, his 1972 series of 25 drawings ‘The Heights of Macchu Picchu’ is on display.
In a statement on Wednesday, SAHMAT said, “Vivan Sundaram has been an initiator and organizer of varied and inventive projects as an extension of his artistic practice. He has had a long-standing identity as an artist-activist engaged with artist groups and collectives, and has used different artistic strategies for collaboration and activism – some of it straightforwardly political/ left oriented.”
“As a trustee of the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), he initiated and conceived art projects and curated exhibitions. In his own words, “… my politicization in the May 1968 student movement took on a specific ideological orientation by association with comrades from the CPI(M), though I have never been a member of the Party. On the art front, there was the setting up of the Kasauli Art Centre in 1976 – its informality and hospitality as well as active exchange and organized discourse. As a founding trustee of SAHMAT from 1989, I have been part of some head-on politics in the period especially from 1990 to 2003. I have curated on behalf of SAHMAT, many small and big exhibitions – installed and roving shows – that were exhibited across the country and that engaged with the public domain through innovative formats”,” the press note continued.