New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery is holding a memorial for Hema Upadhyay on December 24. Upadhyay, 43, was murdered along with her lawyer Harish Bhambhani on December 11 in Mumbai. Their bodies were recovered the next day from a drain in the Mumbai suburb of Kandivali, wrapped in plastic and inside cardboard boxes. The double murder has rocked the closely knit art community of India, most of which is concentrated in the two metros of Mumbai and Delhi. The shock over Hema’s murder has been aggravated due to the latest development in the case — late on December 21, the police arrested Hema’s estranged husband and celebrated artist Chintan Upadhyay after several rounds of questioning. The two were involved in a bitter divorce battle, a fact known to all in the art fraternity though hardly ever discussed, not just to protect the privacy of the two but also because they are both known well to everybody else in the small world of contemporary Indian art.The tragedy has brought focus on the stellar career that Hema was always capable of having, considering that she didn’t take long to establish herself as one of the most important contemporary artists of India. Born in Baroda in 1972, Hema studied at the famous art school in her home city — the Maharaja Sayajirao University. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in painting and a Master’s in Printmaking from the Fine Arts Faculty of MS University in 1995 and 1997 respectively. In 2001, her first solo show titled “Sweet Sweat Memories” was held at Chemould Art Gallery in Mumbai, the city she shifted to after finishing her education. Earlier in the same year, her first solo show abroad was also held. That was titled “The Nymph and The Adult,” and was hosted by Art Space, Sydney. According to Saffronart that has sold many of Hema’s works in the past, her Sydney show had engaged the audiences with fascination and repulsion alike because she had sculpted 2,000 life like cockroaches for the exhibition, in an oblique comment on the socio-political situation in the Indian subcontinent at that time, wondering through her art if cockroaches would be the only survivors of that tough time. It was a good year for Hema to begin her career formally as in 2001, she was also awarded the 10th International Triennale - India prize by the Lalit Kala Akademi. In the following years, she went on to have solo exhibitions and be a part of many prestigious group shows both within India and abroad. She also won prestigious residencies such as those at Art Space, Sydney; Vasl International Artists Residency, Karach; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, USA; Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore; and a residency at Atelier Calder at Saché in the Loire Valley, France, which is the studio of the famous American sculptor Alexander Calder. Hema’s solo show “The Glass House” was shown at Grosvenor Vadehra in London in 2007. She had a long and fruitful association with the gallery that facilitated her solo show, “Universe Revolves On,” at Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI), Singapore, in 2008 and “Extra Ordinary,” a solo held at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda and at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, in 2012. Among several others, she was also a part of the prestigious series of exhibitions titled “Indian Highway” that presented the best of Indian contemporary art in massive exhibitions held in 2011-2012, at multiple venues such as the Lyon Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon; MAXXI: Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, and The Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA), Beijing.The Vadehra Art Gallery remembers her as somebody who challenged the notion of material and medium by continuously experimenting and extending it to newer forms. She was not restricted by the medium and engaged with art equally well through photography, sculpture, installations and painting.— The memorial will be held at Vadehra Art Gallery, D-40 Defence Colony, New Delhi, on December 24, 2015, 5 pm - 6 pmFollow@ARTINFOIndia
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