Developing the artist’s recent return towards painting, Mirror on the ground includes paintings that are a product of nearly two years of continuous effort. Connected by the horizon mediating between the land and sky these paintings culled from memory, blurred and abstracted up close, diverge from the traditions of landscape painting, inviting the viewer to enter and create their own experience of the simultaneous vastness and preciousness of the natural world. Another body of works builds outward from Bala’s ongoing efforts to create while inviting a collaboration with nature, which subtly but completely remake the environments we inhabit. Preparing his canvases, like the surface of earth, Bala employs the forces / processes of nature to shape the surface of his works. Mirror on the ground also includes works which are painted with pigments derived from the elements of the landscape that they depict, these works move beyond illustrating the environment as conventional landscape paintings do—making it, rather, a substantial actor in their making. In the process, the forces of nature reveal themselves in a form of striking abstraction—one which remains materially, even elementally, grounded in the land, soil, and air it represents.

Across the three decades of his career, Bala has become known for his continuous investigation of the material and natural world, along with our capacity to explore, identify and comprehend it. Keenly interested in ways of accessing those parts of life too small, too vast, or simply too everyday to be readily seen, his works challenge viewers to expand their ways of seeing and refocus their habits of attention.

Bala’s works have been featured in exhibitions and collections worldwide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), New York; 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 (KNMA), New Delhi, India; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington; École des Beaux Arts, Paris, France; Lalbhai Museum, Ahmedabad, India; Essl Museum, Austria; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Australia, 1st Singapore Biennale; and 18th Sydney Biennale. In 2001 he was given the Joan Miro foundation award accompanied by a solo exhibition. Bala has been a guest lecturer at the Art Department of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY and a featured speaker at TED.

Alwar Balasubramaniam (Bala) was born in 1971 in Tamil Nadu, India. He received a BFA from the Government College of Arts, Chennai, India, in 1995 after which he continued his studies in Edinburgh and Vienna. In 1998 he was artist in residence at The MacDowell Colony in NH after which he returned to Bangalore, where he lived and practiced till 2015. Subsequently Bala moved to the countryside near Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu where he created his home and studio and continues to live and work.