Sud's choice of medium is a self-imposed limitation which she revels in. Not for her the easy luxury of paint, a medium she has used occasionally. Instead she pushes the possibilities of the zinc plate to the limits, seeking within it the contour and sensuality of sculpture, and the palpable warmth of oil paint. Anupam works in a restrictive mode, even as she strives successfully for greater plasticity in a rigid medium. In recent times she speaks matter of factly of growing eye strain, of a weakening vision which resists the concentrated effort of working on a plate. In this context her paintings appear to provide a form of relief. The detail and taut chiaroscuro of the prints make way for the joyful play of colour, with large bodies creating a dramatic change of scale and palette.
 
 

           If the great printmakers of the past, Albrecht Durer, Daumier, Kathe Kollwitz used print-making for its monochromatic power of statement, Anupam uses it as a language of metaphor. Her's is an instinctive modernism, arrived at through a Renaissance sensibility, a Spinozan conformation of man at the centre of the universe. Correspondingly, there is a strongly fatalistic streak of the kind that informs the writing of nurnerous periods of literary history: Roman stoicism, the brooding tragedy of Greek theatre, the angst of existentialism, the homelessness that informs the writing of Saul Bellow. In her best works, Anupam can evoke 'the nameless unrest and longing discontent' which Thomas Carlyle identified as the dominant mood of Goethe's The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774). That her figures have an innate classic noblesse reinforces the brooding air of the tragic, even in situations that are banal and 'modem'.
 
 

           Anupam's characters have freed themselves from mythic prototype, a seductive alleyway into which several Indian artists stray. Yet these figures seem unable to break themselves free of the chain of events that determine their present. It is a view steeped in scepticism, and edged with sorrow. Their tragic flaw, in a sense, is their odd displacement in time and space; classically sculpted heads and bodies resembling male mannequins or graceful dancers and athletes are placed in a middle-class milieu of crumbling stone facades and values. In an almost obsessive love for the beauty of the perfect nude figure, male and female, Anupam repeats this form. Yet desire and its tactile fruition, the interplay of contact and conversation are frozen in an irresolute limbo. As austere sculpted forms they are virtually untouched by what goes on around them; in fact they are the only unhappy certainty in a shiftless world.
 
 

           Anupam in her use of space and form imbues both with a duality of perception. Primary attraction is for the line, with its 'electric quality' which she follows with a fine understanding of tones. The figure, clean of hair, tautly muscular for its 'animalistic' quality mutates in subtly dramatic ways, and we may vaguely identify prostitutes, doctors, masked men, nude mannequin figures, strangers on a city bench. Suggestion rather than statement prevails, in the delicate balance between theme and pictorial quality. In representing figures, Anupam has moved through some distinct phases. In the mid1970s, architectural forms, limbs and human figures appear in a twilight world. In the late 1970s, preoccupation with the feminine subject prevailed, an approach common among contemporary women artists of the time. Anupam placed these women frequently in positions of deprivation and exploitation, the body itself, young and desirable, becoming a zone of contest. Several of these were images of degradation, and ran counter to the prevailing feminist credo. In a consciously representative phase, the urban poor and homeless of India were seen, sometimes only as a pair of neglected limbs. Behind these is the mouldering urban Indian city, passively constructed in a state of terminal decay. Later, themes of manipulation: dice, prostitution, invasive medical techniques, are depicted with clinical detachment. Within apparent fracture and dismemberment, a freeloading anxiety prevails. The unspoken question however is, what is the artist's relationship with these figures and the situations that they represent?