Talwar Gallery New York is thrilled to present Becoming Nature, an exhibition of recent works by Alwar Balasubramaniam. The works in Becoming Nature reflect the artist’s sustained and ever-deepening relationship with the natural world—not only its landscapes or physical elements, but the forces that surround us. Working across a range of media and materials, Balasubramaniam, known also as Bala, focuses these life-giving forces in ways that make them visible and tangible—bringing the geological and elemental to human-scale. Up in the air renders the invisible process of evaporation into delicate sculptural form, for example—concentric rings of pigment condensing many long, slow moments of exchange between the object and the atmosphere around it. In a similar way, unseen movements of wind and air are recorded viscerally in the stippled, textured reliefs of Wind Field while the seemingly cracked earth surface of I was like you, you will be like me speaks to the cyclical exchange among the most basic elements of our world.
“I am a part and a tiny fraction of nature defined by my ego. I would like to keep expanding my circle by being open towards everything around me and trying to find the hidden meaning.”
Alwar Balasubramaniam
Perhaps most notably, a new series of paintings present elegant and vibrantly colored panels, light and fleetingly detectable as the patterns of a bird’s plumage. The result of several processes of accretion and erasure by Bala, these paintings make beauty a matter of constant movement and transformation. Bala’s works have been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi, India; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; École des Beaux Arts, Paris, France; Essl Museum, Austria; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia, 1st Singapore Biennale; and 18th Sydney Biennale. Bala has been a guest lecturer at the Art Department of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and a featured speaker at TED. Bala was born in 1971 in Tirunelveli, India, to where he lives and works.