Alwar Balasubramaniam
Talwar Gallery, New York is delighted to present “Touch of Air, Traces of Time." The exhibition presents a steady deepening in Bala’s engagement with the natural world—a continuous inquiry into its internal rhythms and cadences, its potencies, and its personalities, that has come to characterize his practice. Working alongside nature as much as on or within it, Bala reveals the beauty and systems governing even the smallest, least perceptible shifts in our environment.
Trace | 2024 (Detail)
In a monumental painting Flown Away the vivid, inky depths and filmy streaks of indigo pigment attest to gravity’s ability to carve trails into topographies while in Cracked Up, a delicate lattice of cracks splinters across a clay surface, registering the grace with which water has evaporated. Offering an encounter with these elemental forces, the works in Touch of Air, Traces of Time at moments envelop and immerse, extending to viewers the chance to commune with nature full-body.
Self-Impression and Trace advance Bala’s explorations with evaporative processes, bringing these to bear on the artistic substrate in a new way; the vibrant indigo infused pools of Self Impression register with fineness the underlying depths from below the canvas. Trace pushes this self-reflexive turn still further; its markedly asymmetrical fields index the ways the canvas has been lifted from this armature, made dynamic - folded, creased, and gathered over time.
Complex but unified, the lines and layers of Bala’s work reveal the energies that, although imperceptible in any given instant, are constantly shaping and re-shaping the material world.
Nothing Holds | 2024
Many of the works in Touch of Air, Traces of Time mark new trajectories in Bala’s ever-renewing practice. Nothing Holds recalls his long-standing interest in the boundaries between bodies and the space that surround them, as well as the capacity of the skin to act as interface and sculptural mold; giving tangible form to the negative space created by two clasped hands, Nothing Holds meditates on the contours of this space, its ridges, crests, and crevices. Other works, meanwhile, draw viewers in, inviting us to meditate on nature at its most intimate scale. Two small landscape paintings, gently created over the course of several years, capture the vastness of the horizon crowned by the endlessly changing sky in works that might fit like a jewel in the palm of a hand.
Bala’s practice is characterized by its wide-ranging exploration across media, perhaps most notable here is his return to printmaking, marking a reengagement with a medium that characterized the earliest moments of the artist’s career while he was a teenager. Reflecting more recent shifts in his practice, however, including his turn towards a collaborative relationship with the natural world. Webs of fine, gossamer lines across washes of translucent pigment on paper spread like the stretches of fields surrounding Bala’s studio bathed in a daily spectacle of changing light.
Nature here is understood beyond its use as a material or a field for inspiration, instead Bala is interested in the processes that bind all this matter together in an ongoing cycle of exchange and movement.
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; Lalbhai Museum, Ahmedabad, 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. In 2001 he was awarded the Joan Miro foundation prize 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.
Since Bala’s move in 2015 to the countryside in southern India, his work has reflected a new closeness and familiarity with the land, grounding both new investigations and artistic returns within his practice—which spans sculpture, installation, printmaking, drawing, painting, as well as works that bridge the divides between these media.