Self as a form of self introspection

Mostly comprising of softly shaded drawings, overlaid with an aqueous layering of color, yet at times scoured over with graphically violent linear markings, these works, address a number of themes.

Of these, several are directly connected to fully realized etchings and paintings, the studied outcomes of reflection, contemplation, and the resolving of subject matter, while a small but significant number are self introspective drawings of her own
visage; as if seeking through this act of peering into a mirror and drawing, a way of self-realization in order to set up a relationship between the self and the other.

It is this incessant obsession with self portraiture that helps us link the other drawings With Anupam Sud’s life quite directly. She has rarely introduced a recognizable resemblance to her own self in her etchings. However, in her paintings, she often does introduce her own presence as a form of witnessing or self introspection.

Often she weaves her personal experiences into the narratives as a way of fixing memory and feelings. For example, in this body of work we see references to a loved one’s suffering caused by prolonged debilitating illness, a portrait of her father, themes of urban alienation, anxieties about the uterine reproductive economy; now harnessed to artificial technologies of conception and birth, and perhaps the most pronounced thematic — the tedium of socially fixed roles demanded of women in patriarchal societies.

This final theme, might seem odd given the fact that on a personal level, Anupam herself belongs to a generation that came of age, when women were beginning to question the illusory promises of romantic fulfillment and economic stability through marriage and were instead seeking a professionally assertive role for themselves as creative and independent beings, unwilling to accept a place within the ‘natural’ order of things.

However in her social life within a middleclass household, she was constantly made aware of the contracted role offered to women as domestic ally enslaved subjects with their maternal, reproductive function their primary role. The subsequent disciplining of the female body, subjected to constant social injunctions on how to behave and the regulatory mechanisms that were put into place to limit their potential were familiar situations—more so because she came to be a pioneering figure in an institutional art world, dominated by men.