Born in India, Sarupa Sidaarth studied at Sir J.J. School of Art and received her MFA at Academy of Art in USA. Her work was recently selected for a group exhibition and billboard in New York by The Untitled Space. Sarupa’s paintings were included in group shows at SFMOMA Artists Gallery, 33 Contemporary, RJD Gallery, JanKossen Contemporary and Site:Brooklyn. In 2014 she was chosen for the Golden Foundation Residency in New York and NordArt in Germany. She won the K.K. Modi Fellowship and Pasca scholarship to France in 2011. Her achievements include NCWCA Mentorship Program, First prize at Brea Gallery's MICA, Frey Foundation Grant and multiple awards at the Academy of Art Annual Exhibition. She has participated in a number of solo and group exhibitions in India, Europe and United States.
About
On my birthday, October 2, 2020 I received a cosmic gift. I lost 15 years’ worth of art, more than a hundred paintings to the Glass Fire in St. Helena, California. Everything we owned was reduced to ashes in the wildfire.
My response to the profound and unimaginable loss was to accept it on the spot. I detached from my former script and stopped flirting with permanence. What seems fixed is actually fluid. I look for no meaning; it cannot be understood as an isolated incident. It is an integrated part of the whole. I found myself in a dynamic interchange between the local and the global, the personal and the universal.
Today a significant part of my artistic legacy survives only in digital format with no tangible form and no comprehensive record of experimental work or markers of creative evolution. The images in the series Feast of Fire are destroyed paintings. I confront life’s non-negotiable curve balls by making a ritual out of creativity. The unfathomable and the indescribable can only be expressed through art.