Ved Nayar
Ved Nayar Ved Nayar

Ved Nayar

Ved Nayar

Ved Nayar

b - 1933

Ved Nayar

Born in Lyallpur in 1933 in pre-Partition Punjab, Ved Nayar’s earliest creative urges were born out of his close engagement with the jungle around his house.

He moved to Delhi as a teenager following Partition and obtained a B.A. degree from the city’s St. Stephen’s College in 1952. He then joined Delhi Polytechnic in 1957 and participated in Lalit Kala Akademi’s national exhibition the same year.

Beginning as a painter, Nayar later included sculpture, installation, archival digital print and photography in his repertoire. The abstract derivations with ritual connotations in the artist’s early paintings gradually evolved into an iconic figure of an elongated human form, mostly female, who dwelt in the intermediate space between the earth and the skies. His art addresses human and environmental concerns, issues of mass consumerism, and cultural globalisation. At the same time, his engagement with man’s quest for immortality sweeps away cultural dimensions of the sacred and the profane, the local and the global.

Nayar won the 1981 Lalit Kala Akademi national award for his sculpture Mankind-2101. In 1988, he designed the citation trophy for the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding.

Nayar lives and works in New Delhi with his artist wife, Gogi Saroj Pal.

‘Programmed in me, I carry compulsions of my cultural identity. I am an aggregate of my local, regional and global consciousness’

VED NAYAR

artworks

dag exhibitions

The ‘Manifestations’ series of 20th Century Indian Art, Editions V, VII, IX

DAG, New Delhi, 2011-13

‘Indian Portraits: The Face of a People’

DAG, New Delhi and Mumbai, 2014

‘Home is a Place: Interiority in Indian Art’

DAG, New Delhi, 2021

notable collections

National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi

Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi

Indian Council for Cultural Relations, New Delhi

Godrej House, Mumbai

Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal

The Glenbarra Art Museum, Himeji

archival media

The Indian Post

16 December, 1989

The Illustrated Weekly of India

8-9 December, 1990

The Economic Times

2 July, 1993

The Pioneer

15 March, 2002

Indian Express

23 October, 2002