Alwar Balasubramaniam born 1971, Tamil Nadu, India.
The artist lives and works in Bangalore, India. He creates sculptures using a range of materials like fiberglass, acrylic, wax and gold to challenge the perceptions and preconceptions of the physical environment by giving form to the ephemeral, invisible and the intangible.
Education
1999
Printmaking, Universitat fur Angewandte Kunste Wien, Austria
1998
Printmaking, EPW Edinburgh, UK
1995
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Government College of Arts, Chennai, India
He earned a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Government College of Fine Arts in Madras in 1995, and has been recognized with prizes and fellowships by major artistic institutions around the world almost every year since. Among those, he received Britain’s Charles Wallace India Trust Arts Fellowship in 1997 and a residency in Vienna from the UNESCO-ASCHBERG Bursary for Artists in 1998. In 2006, he was awarded the Sanskriti Award for Excellence in Visual Arts. In 2008, he was invited to teach art at Cornell University, in Ithaca, NY.
His ghostly sculptures and minimalist two-dimensional works have been exhibited at some of the world’s greatest art institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. Along the way, his work has exhibited at the Mori Art Museum, in Tokyo; the National Portrait Gallery, in Canberra, Australia; the Singapore Biennale; the Sapporo International Print Biennial in Japan; the Egyptian International Print Triennial, in Giza; and at the Lalit Kala Academy, in New Delhi. He has held solo exhibitions in Girona, Spain, Vienna, Mumbai, New Delhi and New York.
ArtForum selected the latter as one of its “Critics’ Picks in 2012.” Of the sculptures in the exhibit, Balasubramaniam has said: “In these works, I've tried to capture the ‘nothingness’ between clasped hands — a space that only exists when the hands are closed. In casting this invisible space, I'm attempting to give form to the non-material and to show that even nothing is something beautiful.”