Born in 1972 in Baroda (India) – Died in 2015 in Mumbai (India).

In residence at the Atelier Calder from September 2010 To January 2011.

Hema Upadhyay belonged to a generation of Indian artists that emerged in the 1990s, at a time when India was undergoing a major economic transition towards globalisation. Responding to the profound transformations shaping their country, these artists contributed to the development of a contemporary Indian art that moved away from tradition to engage more directly with lived realities.

Working across a wide range of media—including painting, drawing, photography, and installation—Hema Upadhyay came to international prominence in the early 2000s. Her work was presented at venues such as the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (2008), the MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome (2009), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where she took part in the group exhibition Paris–Bombay–Delhi (2011).

Prematurely deceased in 2015, the artist was deeply engaged with questions of migration and demographic flows. While rooted in the broader history of India, these concerns also resonated on a more personal level for Hema Upadhyay. Born into a Pakistani family that migrated to India at the time of Partition13, she herself had to come to terms with the vast scale of Mumbai after growing up and studying in a much smaller city. From that point on, India’s largest megacity became a recurring source of inspiration for the artist, who gained recognition through large-scale installations rooted in specific areas of Mumbai, such as the Dharavi slum.

These works unfold as large-scale maquettes that recreate the organic growth of ever-expanding urban landscapes—at once vibrant and chaotic, shaped by processes of evolution and destruction, invention and precarity. By immersing the viewer in densely packed environments of countless multi-coloured dwellings, the artist questioned the nature of the external gaze, often voyeuristic and elevated, directed at developing countries.