Hema Upadhyay

Hema Upadhyay was born in Baroda, India, in 1972 and died in 2015. 

Hema Upadhyay belonged to a generation of Indian artists that emerged in the 1990s, during the country’s economic transition toward globalization. Working across painting, drawing, photography, and installation, she often incorporated everyday objects, transforming them through new contexts and associations. Her work explored how objects can change in meaning and form, becoming vehicles for complex and often provocative experiences. She juxtaposed urban landscapes with imagined versions reconstructed in artificial environments to explore how landscapes can become expressions of the human imagination.  

At Atelier Calder, Upadhyay undertook a new body of research and developed a large-scale installation contrasting the natural landscape of the Touraine region with environments shaped by human development, particularly Mumbai. She worked with materials associated with memory and consciousness, ideas often overlooked amid modernization and urban growth. For the installation, she used plexiglass for its transparency, allowing her to engage with the beauty of the landscape around Saché. By bringing this nondegradable material into contact with natural elements, Upadhyay highlighted the paradoxes of contemporary society and its growing dependence on materials created by humans that remain in the environment, often indefinitely.