The Journey A Full Circle

This exhibition bookends Anupam Sud’s practice in an intriguing manner to seek linkages between her early and late career works. As she stands at a transformative crossroads of her life, printmaker Anupam Sud can take a precious moment to look back at the images she has shared it with. Alliterations of space play a prominent part in her early etchings along with aspects of sexuality, risqué deviations for a middle-class artist to found her practice on, but the assured representation of the body in her later works lifts the veil of any pretence about its importance to her work.

Like memories, each image dwells in her consciousness, self-willed and independent and with its own agency, like changelings that transform and adapt with every new relationship their creator foists upon them. Singularly, as a couple, or in groups marked by nuanced changes in the details that surround them, their personalities undergo changes, shed old skins and adopt new ones to reflect society’s ever-changing dynamics of power, manipulation, desire and control. Occasionally ironic or sardonic, she mutes the femaleness of her printmaking by courting the male nude and even turning it into an object of female observation.

In this, the autumn of her life, Sud has wearied, finally, of printmaking—not of its magic, but of the arduous physicality it demands. Bogged down by its exertions, she has decided to take a leave of absence from the very medium that has defined her career, though she has also painted simultaneously, as also increasingly, in recent years. That way too lies the future, amidst graphite and paint, paper and canvas, almost certainly beckoning her with a fresh cast of characters.

For make no mistake, Anupam Sud has been a chronicler of stories, a communicator of the fables of our times, holding up a mirror to our naked, reflected selves. Using a commonsensical intelligence, she has reposited our beliefs and our faith through nudging questioning, laying down a discreet gauntlet for the interloper chancing upon a scene that she leaves open-ended, almost as if asking: what might the viewer have made of these circumstances.

There are stories for the picking in her printmaking, and stories within stories, for she is rarely content with a singular, definitive or defined resolution or opinion—which is why she prefers to leave her compositional narratives open-ended, a trompe l’oeil of suggestions in which, the task to sift fact from fiction is left unattended. She professes to be a narrator who chooses ambiguity over congruence, like skeins of unravelling threads, so the observant viewer may make of his voyeuristic presence what he chooses. ‘Art is an open road with footpaths that lead away to keep viewers interested in what the work has to say to them,’ she says. This is key to understanding the way Sud’s work has evolved from her early practice when she first became adept at stringing together the parables that sum up our times. ‘I belong to the society I represent,’ she says. ‘How can I remain silent about it?’. Any wonder her work continues to speak volumes.