Osian's Auction Catalogue India The Passionate Detachment | February 2001

72 THE PASSIONATE DETACHMENT 32 VIVAN SUNDARAM (b. 1943) Gulf War Series (with Self-Portrait) Signed in English, t.r. Engine Oil & Charcoal on handmade paper, August 1991 112 x 75.5 cm. (44.9 x 29.7”) Rs. 125,000 - 175,000 $ 2,660 - 3,725 “ In his works on paper, Vivan Sundaram collides various ‘separates’: history, and the representation of it; the world of objective reality and memory, civilisational/personal; a disaster ‘out there’ and the practice of art. Discursive practices, objects as material, as symbolic order, and so on and on. The collision makes the work of art function on several levels, moving from the far edges of intellect-that ‘subtle instrument’ -to the gut responses of the body-the eve in its ‘savage state’. Images are transposed, seen through different registers; a push and pull of mind and body to seek other formations of meaning.” (Rasna Bhusan, from Engine Oil and Charcoal: Works on Paper ExC . 1991 ). “ The charcoal and engine oil drawings reveal dense stratification. An archaeology, a piling up of the graphic maze. This gives way to a literal peeling or tearing of the paper, to reveal the tissue below which has been etched by the engine oil. These additive notations lie on the cutting edge of the personal signature. Desequenced elements move centrifugally. They are held in tension by a sub-text that seeks understanding of oneself from a casual remark to its elaboration into more complex narratives.” (Vivan Sundaram, rpt. in Gallery Espace’ s Drawing ‘94. p98).