Anupam Sud: Human Puzzles on display at KNMA

By Rajesh Kumar

‘The Rear Window’ by Anupam Sud seems as an apt depiction of urban life that shows the public hush and rush in a city bus of Delhi, with emphasis on the human body. “Sinister and enigmatic, deceptive and irreal, these compositions also carry a subtle sense of humour, playfulness and even mischief. Anupam’s works are often presented in the style of a puzzle or a game.” comments Roobina Karode in her curatorial note for the exhibition ‘Between Vows & Words’. The show takes its title from an etching by Anupam Sud. In her note, Roobina views the artist’s dimly lit chiaroscuro-laden imagery as “a realm suspended between…theatric vows and broken words.” She justifies the title of the retrospective by declaring that the viewer “is expected to traverse the speculative terrain of interpretation, quite like the couple in Between Vows and Words (1995)—trapped in the twilight zone between the enunciations of promise and the terms of agreement unmoored and floating without syntax or meaning.”

When viewed from the perspective of an art lover, even the huge museum space of KNMA seems a bit too small to contain the variety and scale of artworks by Anupam Sud in the ongoing exhibition. The figures in the large canvases gaze back to the eyes of the viewer, with their eyes expressing doubt over their identity against the backdrop of various incidents from the past.

The exhibition displays works from various series by Anupam, such as the ‘Dialogue Series’ that shows human communication without any spoken words. This series comprises human figures in dialouges — sometimes disjunctive — with the backdrops of some key socio-political events of past decades, such as the 2008 terrorist attack and the birth of the first test tube baby. Other artworks in the show depict male and female sexualities, and the human predicament in an urban life.

Witnessing Anupam’s artworks from her long career span of five decades was quite an experience in and of itself. The voluminous and thoughtful output is a testament to the artist’s unwavering dedication towards her art practice. Her images strongly evokes many inner feelings and emotions in a viewer.

Anupam has been an artist adept at the art of drawing, and her oeuvre is widely appreciated the world over for her printmaking works. The exhibit showcases her expertise in etching, through which she has deftly engaged with socially relevant themes and interrelation between males and females. The artist was a student in the Printmaking Department set up by another luminary of Indian Modern Art — Somnath Hore, and taught there as well for quite some time. In her printmaking practice, we not only see a brilliant artist skilfully depicting human life bordering on the existential, but we also get to witness the continuity and development of the art of printmaking in the country. Anupam Sud was the youngest member of Group 8 — an art group dedicated solely to printmaking, created in 1968 by Anupam’s college teacher and artist Jagmohan Chopra.