Hema Upadhyay, résidency September 2010 to January 2011
Hema Upadhyay was born in 1972 in Baroda, India and died in Bombay in December 2015.
She studied painting and fine arts at Baroda University. She lived and worked in Bombay.
Hema Upadhyay used different techniques: painting, drawing, photography, which she combined in her work, she also made installations from ordinary collected objects, which she reappropriated.
Hema Upadhyay explored the transformation of forms, according to the physical quality or the narrative of these objects, which become supports for events, complex and provocative artistic and aesthetic experiences. She juxtaposed urban landscapes and their allegories, recomposed in artificial environments, modifying their appearance until they became metaphors of the human imagination.
At the Atelier Calder Hema Upadhyay undertook new research, where she conceived a project visually different from what she had been able to achieve before.
In a large-scale installation, Hema Upadhyay confronts the natural landscape of Touraine with that shaped by man, particularly that of Bombay, through the use of materials that symbolize memory and consciousness, notions often absent in the era of modernity and urban development.
In this new work, she has used Plexiglas, which the artist chose for its transparency, thus, this chemical material allows her to render the beauty of the landscape of Saché.
By confronting this non-biodegradable material with the presence of natural elements, the artist wanted to challenge the viewer, on all these materials elaborated by Man and which will no longer disappear from the Earth.
Several solo exhibitions have been devoted to him, notably in Singapore at the Tyler Print Institute (2008), at the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome "Where the bees suck, there suck I" (2009).
She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including "Indian Summer" at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris (2005), "Bombay Maximum City", Tri postal, Lille (2006), she exhibited at the Claude Berry Indian Focus Foundation in Paris in 2008.
In 2010, she participated in the architecture triennial "Arts and Cities" in Nagoya, Japan, she exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in London "The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today", at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Herning, Denmark "Indian Highway".