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Lot Essay
Testing the boundaries of sense of perception, Alwar Balasubramaniam stands at the vanguard of a new band of artists emerging on the global stage. Featured in the New York Museum of Modern Art's ground-breaking exhibition, On Line: Drawing through The Twentieth Century in 2010 -- 2011, and forums such as TED conference, a lecture series dedicated to the presentation of the most innovative minds, Balasubramaniam has established his presence as an unassailable artistic and intellectual force.
Balasubramaniam's practice uses a diverse range of materials in his sculptures, including sand, silicone, iron, bronze, stone and fiberglass. He tackles fundamental questions of existence through his artistic interventions, such as the nature of perception, and its relationship to form. His sculptural transcriptions of air, breath, light, shadow, and gravity exceed sculpture and form. Formed from his intellectual investigations of the nature of phenomenon and experience, Gravity captures an invisible power.
Gravity is a contradition in terms. It is a portrait of the artist formed from the transcription of his absence. Evidencing the human body and the space it once habited through the physicalization of its traces, the bust is a sculpture of space. Moving beyond representing the mundane and the perceivable, the artist binds form onto the essential forces that constitute natural phenomena.
"For over a decade now Balasubramaniam has kept pushing our limits of perception, understanding of material and experience of space. The phenomenons created by home reveal the omnipresent but invisible, the strong yet unnoticed the essential yet overlooked. An encounter with his works discloses not just the world surrounding us but also the world within us. Bala allows us to transgress the boundaries between elements, as they connect and converge into one another, questioning the submissiveness of our consciousness to them and in process their foundation" (D. Talwar, 'The Art of Nothingness', (IN)Between, Delhi, 2010, unpaginated)
The elegance and subtlety of form of his sculptures is celebrated. Featured in the Guggenheim Museum's aptly named Contemplating the Void in 2010, Balasubramaniam was also among the prestigious art journal ARTFORUM's 'Critics' Picks' of 2012. Much like his work, Balasubramaniam transcends categorisation. Regional specificity is elided in favour of untedhered artistry; Balasubramaniam figures as a visionary bound to a deeply personal, yet profoundly universal capacity for expression.
Balasubramaniam's practice uses a diverse range of materials in his sculptures, including sand, silicone, iron, bronze, stone and fiberglass. He tackles fundamental questions of existence through his artistic interventions, such as the nature of perception, and its relationship to form. His sculptural transcriptions of air, breath, light, shadow, and gravity exceed sculpture and form. Formed from his intellectual investigations of the nature of phenomenon and experience, Gravity captures an invisible power.
Gravity is a contradition in terms. It is a portrait of the artist formed from the transcription of his absence. Evidencing the human body and the space it once habited through the physicalization of its traces, the bust is a sculpture of space. Moving beyond representing the mundane and the perceivable, the artist binds form onto the essential forces that constitute natural phenomena.
"For over a decade now Balasubramaniam has kept pushing our limits of perception, understanding of material and experience of space. The phenomenons created by home reveal the omnipresent but invisible, the strong yet unnoticed the essential yet overlooked. An encounter with his works discloses not just the world surrounding us but also the world within us. Bala allows us to transgress the boundaries between elements, as they connect and converge into one another, questioning the submissiveness of our consciousness to them and in process their foundation" (D. Talwar, 'The Art of Nothingness', (IN)Between, Delhi, 2010, unpaginated)
The elegance and subtlety of form of his sculptures is celebrated. Featured in the Guggenheim Museum's aptly named Contemplating the Void in 2010, Balasubramaniam was also among the prestigious art journal ARTFORUM's 'Critics' Picks' of 2012. Much like his work, Balasubramaniam transcends categorisation. Regional specificity is elided in favour of untedhered artistry; Balasubramaniam figures as a visionary bound to a deeply personal, yet profoundly universal capacity for expression.