Kadia's birds have long left the canvas. They live now in the eye of every person who has ever stood before his work and, for just a moment, felt completely free.
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.