Avinash Chandra was born in Shimla (also known as Simla), India, in 1931 and was brought up there and in Delhi, where he studied art. In 1956, he immigrated to London, England on a scholarship to continue his artistic education. In the UK Chandra developed an international career as an exhibited and commissioned artist, his work gradually evolving from landscape towards more sensuous studies of the female body. In 1965, when Tate purchased his painting 'Hills of Gold' (1964), he became one of the first Indian artists to be represented in the national collection, along with FN Souza.
Painter Avinash Chandra was born in Shimla (known as Simla until 1972), in what was then known as 'British India', now India, on 28 August 1931. He was brought up in Shimla and in Delhi where his father was manager of the Cecil Hotel. Between 1947 and 1952, he studied painting at the Delhi Polytechnic Art School, where he taught from 1953 to 1956. Among his students were the artists Paramjit Singh, Arpita Singh and Gopi Gajwani. In 1954, Chandra was awarded first prize at the First National Exhibition of Art held at the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi, and his painting Trees (1954) was acquired by the city's newly founded National Gallery of Modern Art. During the early 1950s, he was also a member of the progressive artists' movement, Delhi Silpi Chakra. After three successful exhibitions and relative fame, however, Chandra grew dissatisfied and felt limited by the artistic scope in Delhi. In 1956, along with his artist wife Prem Lata, he left Delhi and moved to London, England, on a scholarship to study at St Martin's School of Art. The couple settled in Golders Green in north London, an area popular with an earlier generation of Jewish migrants. Chandra's first exhibition in England was hosted by the Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society and held at the Commonwealth Institute (then the Imperial Institute), London, in 1957. The following year, he participated in the group exhibition Seven Indian Artists in Europe at Gallery One, London. In 1959, his debut solo exhibition toured to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he lived for a time, painting increasingly colourful landscapes. The late 1950s also saw Chandra seeking to break away from his earlier education to find his own artistic expression. While his early paintings were townscapes and landscapes rendered in mostly intense colours, often accompanied by swirling suns and moons, he slowly moved toward a more sexually explicit style with layered, rounded forms and bodies in the 1960s and 1970s, taking the female body as his main subject.
The 1960s brought Chandra great public success and critical acclaim, receiving attention from national newspapers and major art magazines. Exhibiting across Europe and the USA, he gained widespread recognition. He held a number of solo shows in London galleries, such as the Molton Gallery (1960, founded by German émigré, Annely Juda) and Hamilton Galleries (1965), and his paintings were exhibitied across Europe, including at Galerie de l’Université in Paris in 1961. In 1962, he was profiled by art historian W. G. Archer in a BBC documentary entitled Art of Avinash Chandra. That same year he received the Prix Européen in Ostend.
Chandra was the first Indian artist to be exhibited both in Documenta in Kassel, Germany (1964) and at Tate Britain (1965). When Tate purchased his painting Hills of Gold (1964) that year, he became one of the first Indian artists to be represented in the national collection, along with FN Souza. Chandra also undertook several corporate art commissions, including a mosaic mural for the Indian High Commission in Lagos, Nigeria in 1962, a colour glass mural for the Pilkington Brothers' new office building in St Helens, Lancashire, and a fibre-glass mural for the new Indian Tea Centre in Oxford Street, London, both in 1964. Around 1965, he received an award for travel and study from the Fairfield Foundation and moved to New York, USA where he was well received by the American art community. He returned to London in 1971 and married the actress Valerie Murray in 1977. In the late 1970s he was a member of the Indian Artists UK group (founded as the Indian Painters Collective in 1963). He held further solo exhibitions in London, including at the October Gallery (1981) and Horizon Gallery (1987), and his work was featured at the National Theatre in 1982. In 1989, he was included in the seminal exhibition The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain curated by Rasheed Araeen at the Hayward Gallery on London's Southbank, the last exhibition of his work during his lifetime.
Avinash Chandra died in London, England on 15 September 1991 from kidney failure. Renewed interest in his work from the mid-2000s saw retrospective exhibitions at Osborne Samuel LLP/Berkeley Square Gallery in London in 2006 and at the India- and US-based DAG Modern in 2015-16. Chandra's work was also included in the exhibitions Migrations: Journeys into British Art at Tate Britain in 2012 and Midnight's Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain presented online by Ben Uri in 2020. Chandra also featured in the BBC documentary Whoever Heard of a Black Artist? in 2018. Avinash Chandra's work is held in UK public collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Durham University, Tate, County Hall Leicestershire, Arts Council of Great Britain, and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Avinash Chandra]
Publications related to [Avinash Chandra] in the Ben Uri Library