Alwar Balasubramaniam

Alwar Balasubramaniam also known as “Bala,” is an Indian artist works in a variety of mediums such as sculpture, painting and printmaking. He was born in 1971 in Tamil Nadu, India. His work, ranging in subjects from the body and its material relationship with the world to the shadow of a shadow, has been the subject of international acclaim, and has been featured in museums and exhibitions worldwide.
Career.
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), 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 Talwar Gallery in New York City in 2002. 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 Talwar Gallery in New York and New Delhi throughout his career.
Other notable showings include "Sk(in)" at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. 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 and "On Line" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010-2011. 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; Essl Museum, Austria; 1st Singapore Biennale; École des Beaux Arts, Paris, France; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia; and the 18th Biennale of Sydney, Australia.
Work.
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. 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. 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. 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.
Education.
1995- Bachelor of Fine Arts, Government College of Arts, Madras, India
1998- EPW (Printmaking) Edinburgh, UK
1999- Universität fur Angewandte Kunste (Printmaking) Wien, Austria
Publications Available.
2009- "(IN)BETWEEN". With an essay by Deepak Talwar, 2009.
2007- "(In")"visible". With an essay by Sharmini Pereira, 2007.
2005- "Transition and Transformation". University Gallery, Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts. With essays by Loretta Yarlow and Deepak Talwar, 2005.