Bad Drawings for Dost
Publisher: Gallery Chemould
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Mumbai, India
Format: Softcover
Description: Excerpt from Nancy Adajania, Bad Drawings for Dost: Vivan Sundaram, Gallery Chemould, India, 2006:

'Dedicated to [Vivan Sundaram’s] lifelong friend and fellow artist Bhupen Khakhar, these drawings mark Sundaram’s complete return to pictoriality, to the graphic image rendered directly by the artist’s own hand, after more than a decade of work in assemblage, sculpture-installation, video art and digital photo-montage. [… These drawings] deny ease of access to the viewer, preferring to reveal themselves through aberrations: through the blur of graphite on translucent tracing paper, the pencil mark that appears like a persistent blind spot, and the rubbings that disintegrate into layers of silver-grey dust on the paper surface. […] Sundaram traces his drawings over, and in relation to, some of the key works from the Khakhar canon; these tracings are all the more powerful for having been drained of the colour for which their referent paintings are notable. This tracing manoeuvre allows Sundaram to achieve two objectives. First, it gives him a tactile connection with Khakhar’s work, as though, by touching his paintings, he could make contact with the departed presence again. […] Secondly, I would suggest that Sundaram’s act of translating Khakhar’s images offers him a degree of freedom of the kind achieved by a musician who makes a piano transcription of an orchestral score in classical music.'