Barely Told Tales
PRINTMAKER ANUPAM SUD GETS AN ENCYCLOPAEDIC VIEWING AT A KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART RETROSPECTIVE
What delightful subversions she creates, the diminutive Anupam Sud—so painfully shy, so brazenly confrontational—as she lays bare the anatomies of virile men with taut torsos and women with voluptuous breasts, stopping just coyly short of exposing their genitals. Her protagonists feast on each other’s bodies, but the food on their tables is a more contested space. Apples and serpents suggest temptations as she mocks Draupadi’s husbands for their impotency in protecting her honour. She mines physical relationships that explore the illicit while remaining respectful of middle-class morality. Her feisty contexts allow both feminism and femininity to co-habit.
Between Vows and Words, a careerdefining retrospective on view at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi, investigates all of this—Sud’s excoriating indictments of social and political vulnerabilities and masochism thinly veiled by scathing mockery that questions everything from patriarchy to class and gender disparity. Curator Roobina Karode positions Sud’s contexts on the basis of the 1995 print that gives the exhibition its title, depicting a couple as “entrapped by the enunciations of promise”. Sud draws blood, metaphorically if not literally, even as her prints deconstruct colour in favour of chiaroscural depth. Refreshingly contrarian, Sud took up printmaking as a challenge when she was told at the College of Art, New Delhi, that the medium with its heavy lifting of plates wasn’t fit for women. Mentored by Somnath Hore and Jagmohan Chopra, she pursued a career as a teacher at her alma mater while practising as a printmaker. She also trained at the Slade School of Art, London, in the early 1970s, and, again, in the late 1990s. Mapping her career, one finds Sud returning to the body physical as a prime site for her practice, in which masks, hair (or its absence), sexual ambiguity but also its transgressions, its veneration but equally its desecration, have played a part. Whether architecture or interiors, balconies or crowded buses, public parks or more intimate salons, she has used them as a stage “where men and women rehearse their scripted roles and seductive power”, says Karode. The artist herself acknowledges, “My works are reflections of the environment and people around me.”
Occupying important space in an exhibition otherwise devoted to prints are Sud’s paintings, eye-catching for the sudden efflorescence of colour. She has painted for most of her career, mostly as an aid to her printmaking, but her prints have rarely influenced her painting. “My print images can never convert into painterly images for the canvas as the working body itself rebels,” she observes. “When images enter my mind, I see textures that belong either to etching or to painting.”
In 2008, Sud was in an accident that had led to a temporary loss of memory and she needed time to recuperate, following which she spent much more time on paintings. While these continue to explore the artist’s identity as a woman and her relationship to family, it is a large 2000 painting, ‘Dressing for a Journey’, that draws our attention to “the complexities of female subjectivity”—Sud’s defining trait as an artist and a printmaker. ■