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 from 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 years of his career, his paintings were in representational and in black and white. Now, he has completely removed all traces of depicting figures in his paintings, reaching a point where he doesn't need to include explanatory sketches, convey a story through visuals, or incorporate mythological details just to captivate 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, leading him to move away from square and rectangular compositional compact to circular ones. Artists have rarely used circular composition, but in his hands they become terrestrial to supra terrestrial, layered with variations of meaning. Most of these works are in acrylic or mixed media, executed with dry pastel, graphite, watercolour, Chinese ink, acrylic paints and different printmaking media. His work radiates luminosity for this reason.
He taught fine arts at the Rajasthan School of Art, Jaipur, and served as an editor of the State Akademi of Fine Arts, Rajasthan. Apart from being an artist and a teacher, he has curated numerous shows and served as an executive board member for the National Akademi of Fine Arts in New Delhi.
He received the National award, Lalit Kala Akademi, for painting in 1981; the All India award by UP state Akademi in 1984, Bihar Lalit Kala Akademi in 1985, 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, and his works are in both public and private collections.
