Vidyasagar Upadhyay was born in 1948 in Rajasthan. He received his Masters in Fine Arts in painting from the University of Udaipur, 1970 and PhD in Painting by Mohan Lal Sukhadia university, Udaipur in 1996.
For Vidyasagar, teaching was an essential part of his experience as an artist, as in his childhood he was inspired by his school drawing teacher and his surroundings.
In the formative stage his paintings were representational. As the years went by, his work began to shed figurative excesses to build a compact whole in high-tension colour fields. Now he has totally banished all vestiges of figure paintings to reach a stage where he does not have to use illustrative jottings, suggest a narrative through the visuals or implant some details from myth for the purpose of luring the viewers. Like great non-figurative painters from Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock to Gastan Bertrand, he has also used abstraction in painting as it is used in music.
His abstractions have now explored the extreme limits of non-figuration. This has made him move away from square and rectangular compositional compact to circular ones. Artist have rarely used circular composition, in his hand they become terrestrial to supra terrestrial. They are also layered with variation of meaning. Most of these works are in acrylic, or, are in mixed media. He has executed them with dry pastel, graphite, watercolour and acrylic paints. His work radiates luminosity for this reason.
He was the editor for the State Akademi of Fine Art, Rajasthan and has curated many shows.
He has taught fine arts in Rajasthan School of Art, Jaipur and was an editor of State Akademi of Fine Arts, Rajasthan. Apart from being an artist and a teacher he has also curated a few shows. He has served as an executive board member for National Akademi of Fine Arts – New Delhi.
He received the National award, Lalit Kala Akademi, for painting in 1981; All India award by UP state Akademi in 1984 and the All India award by Rajasthan Lalit Kala Akademi, Jaipur in 1991.
He has exhibited his work both in India and across the world.
