SUNDARAM TAGORE

DIRECTOR BIO

Sundaram Tagore is a Calcutta-born Oxford-educated art historian, gallerist, and an award-winning filmmaker. A descendant of the influential poet and Nobel Prize-winner Rabindranath Tagore, he promotes East-West dialogue through his contributions to numerous exhibitions as well as his four art galleries and their multicultural and multidisciplinary events.

Tagore’s debut film, The Poetics of Color: Natvar Bhavsar, An Artist’s Journey, premiered at the MIAAC Film Festival in New York City in 2010 and garnered several festival awards, including The Accolade, The Indie Fest, and the esteemed Singaporean National Critics Choice Readers Award for Best New Art Film Epic Documentary of the Year and Best New Director (2012). The film has been shown at venues around the world, including the Hong Kong Art Centre, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum, the Newport Beach Film Festival and the India International Centre.

Tagore’s second film, Tiger City, is a feature-length documentary on the world-renowned architect Louis I. Kahn.

Sundaram Tagore was born in India in 1961 and grew up traveling between Calcutta, New Delhi and the Himalayas, where he went to school. His efforts to engage others in the exchange of ideas through aesthetic means is driven by a passion for cultural dialogue and service. These values are part of the Tagore family legacy. Rabindranath Tagore worked tirelessly through his life encouraging others to break free from “narrow domestic walls,” as he put it, through social justice and a universalism that merged the best ideas of East and West. His well-known dialogues with other great thinkers of his era, including Albert Einstein, Pablo Neruda and W. B. Yeats, centered on universalism and the fundamental questions of human existence. Thanks to Sundaram’s father, Subho Tagore, one of India’s first modernist painters, a poet and a magazine publisher who was raised by Rabindranath, Sundaram was surrounded by the most interesting thinkers, writers, artists, journalists and musicians of the day.

Tagore completed his undergraduate and graduate degrees in the United States and pursued a D.Phil. in modern history at the University of Oxford. His academic pursuits—focusing on Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, American architect Louis Kahn’s work in Bangladesh, and Indian artists’ response to European modernism—cemented his passion for cross-cultural exchange and it was in this spirit that he opened his galleries.

Before opening his own gallery in 2000, Tagore was a director at Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York. He has also advised and worked with many international organizations including the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the United Nations.

A candidate for a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Oxford, Tagore also writes for numerous art publications. His feature-length articles have appeared in ARTnews, Art in America, and Art India. He also lectures frequently on art, most recently at the Tällberg Forum in Sweden, Sotheby’s, the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club and Singapore Management University.

In 2015, Tagore organized and curated Frontiers Reimagined, a Collateral Event of the 56th Venice Biennale. The exhibition brought together work by forty-four painters, sculptors, photographers and installation artists from twenty-five countries who are exploring the notion of cultural boundaries. The show, which was co-curated with art historian Dr. Marius Kwint, was mounted at the historic Museo di Palazzo Grimani in Venice. Attendance exceeded expectations, with a record 25,000 visitors and the show received media coverage from around the world, including articles in Art + Auction, Blouin Artinfo, The Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar and The ArtNewspaper, which named Frontiers Reimagined one of the five must-see exhibitions in Venice.