Alwar Balasubramaniam

Alwar Balasubramani (born in 1971), known professionally as Bala, is an Indian painter, printmaker and sculptor. His work has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan; École des Beaux-Arts, Paris France. Bala has been a guest lecturer at the Art Department of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

Alwar Balasubramaniam was born in 1971, in Tamil Nadu. In 1995, Bala graduated from Government College of Fine Arts with a specialisation in printmaking.^[1] He continued his studies at the Edinburgh Printmakers and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.^[1]

Bala began his artistic journey with painting but shifted decisively toward sculpture and installation following a 1998 residency with the Putnam graphics studio at MacDowell Colony in Massachusetts.^[2][3] This transition marked a new phase in his practice, driven by an interest in multidimensionality and the physical encounter with form and perception. Bala's work centers on the human body and the bodies interaction with the material environment and intangible elements such as light, air, and shadow.^[4] He is known for embedding sculptures in walls.^[5]

His first solo exhibition in the United States was held at Talwar Gallery, New York, in 2002, featuring body-cast sculptures, monoprints, and a heat-sensitive work that revealed itself only under specific temperatures. Bala received further international recognition with his large-scale outdoor and site-specific installations including Sk(in) (2012) at The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., Unfixed Being (2005) at the Davidson College's Van Every/Smith Galleries, North Carolina, and Into Thin Air (2004) at Talwar Gallery, New York, which explore the tension between interior and exterior, matter and void. He received the Joan Miró Prize from the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, which led to a solo exhibition Traces (2002) with the foundation. He has been a part of numerous group exhibitions including Contemplating the Void at Guggenheim Museum and Knowledge of the Past Is the Key to the Future and Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt and On Line at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He and the Biennales of Sydney and Singapore, and Knowledge of the Past Is the Key to the Future and Afterlives: Contemporary Art in the Byzantine Crypt ).

Between 1998 and 2015, Bala lived and worked in Bengaluru, Karnataka.^[1] As of 2015, Bala lives and works in his ancestral village outside of Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu.^[1][6]