Born in 1956 in Ahmedabad, Mahendra Kadia was one of India's most distinctive contemporary artists. A man whose entire life was shaped by a single, consuming obsession: the bird in flight. Growing up in the old walled pol neighbourhoods of Ahmedabad, a young Kadia spent countless hours watching birds gather at the feeders outside his home. His father was a tailor with no connection to the arts, yet something in that boyhood image of wings against open sky never left him. It became the language through which he would eventually speak to the world.
He spent over three decades at the L & P Hutheesing Visual Art Centre, joining in 1983 and eventually serving as its Honorary Director from 2008 until his passing. He also taught for years as a professor at C.N. College of Fine Arts. Nationally recognised with an award from the Lalit Kala Akademi, as well as honours from the Gujarat State Lalit Kala Academy and the Art Theatre, Calcutta, and a National Fellowship from the Department of Culture, Kadia's legacy is held in collections belonging to Jaya Bachchan, Sangeeta Jindal, and Urmila Kanoria, as well as in the permanent holdings of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. In January 2018, his landmark retrospective Lines to Strokes was presented in Ahmedabad.
Mahendra Kadia's art is a testament to a lifetime of inquiry, a quiet, persistent pursuit of meaning through the stroke of a brush, the drift of a bird, and the unending search for grace.