Hema Upadhyay Age, Death, Husband, Family, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Hema Upadhyay

• Hema Upadhyay belonged to a Marwadi-Gujarati family in Vadodara, Gujarat.

• While pursuing her graduation at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, she met Chintan Upadhyay in 1992. Soon after they met, they started dating.

• After completing her formal education in Vadodara, she moved to Mumbai along with Chintan Upadhyay to establish her art career.

•  In 2001, Hema did her first solo exhibition in Australia for the first time. She created an artwork titled ‘The Nymph and the Adult’, for which, she sculpted approximately 2000 lifelike cockroaches.
  

  A picture of Hema Upadhyay working on her installation at the Artspace in Sydney, Australia

   

• In 2001, she won the First Prize at the Tenth Triennale in India.

• In 2003, she did a collaboration with Chintan Upadhyay. They created an artwork titled Made in China on the theme of mass consumerism, globalisation, and loss of identity.
  

  A picture of the Made in China (2004) show at an art gallery in Delhi

• In 2003, she attended the Vasl residency in Karachi, Pakistan, where she made an artwork titled Loco-Foco-Motto that spoke about the India-Pakistan partition. This was later showcased in a group show at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy.
  

  Hema Upadhyay’s artwork Loco Foco Motto (2010)

• In May 2010, she led a team of volunteers at the Aberdeen Centre in Richmond, British Columbia, for the 2009-2011 Vancouver Biennale for three weeks to create a performance artwork titled Loco-Foco-Motto that resulted in the creation of six vortex-like chandeliers composed of 7,50,000 unlit coloured matchsticks.

• This artwork was also presented at the Richmond Art Gallery and the Surrey Art Gallery in Canada in an exhibition entitled.

• In 2010, she also received a residency invite from the Atelier Calder, Sache, France. While there, she created an artwork called “Only Memory has Preservatives,” which was a replica of a forest. She made it using copyright-free images of different trees from the area, effectively creating a landscape without using materials from nature.
  

  Hema Upadhyay’s artwork Only Memories has preservatives (2010)

   

• Hema did numerous solo Exhibitions around the globe including Extra Ordinary (2012), Mute Migration (2012), and Where the bees suck, there suck I (2009).
  

  Hema Upadhyay’s work Espace Topographie de l’Art, Festival D’ Automne a Paris in Paris

• In 2010, Chintan filed for divorce from her and they were granted the divorce in 2014 by a family court in Mumbai. During this time, the couple was always in the news over their petty fights in public. After filing for divorce, they lived in separate rooms in the same flat in Mumbai.

• In 2013, Hema filed a case against her ex-husband Chintan Upadhyay accusing him of harassing her. She claimed that he painted obscene sketches on the walls of their flat in Mumbai. She was represented by Haresh Bhambani. Hema lost the case because Chintan’s bedroom was his personal space.

• After their divorce in 2014, Chintan moved to Delhi and Hema began residing at their flat on the Juhu Tara road in Mumbai.

• On 11 December 2015, Hema Upadhyay along with her lawyer Hiresh Bhambhani were killed.

• According to the earlier police investigation, Hema was killed because of a financial dispute between her and her fabricator Vidyadhar Rajbhar (alias Gotu). According to Gotu’s associates, she owed money to the fabricator and over the past few months, Vidhyadhar visited her house quite a few times to get the money.

• Later, after the police investigation, it was found that Vidhyadhar Rajbhar was very close to Hema’s ex-husband’s family and Chintan had helped Vidhyadhar quite a few times in the past financially. It was also found that Chintan had also supported Vidyadhar’s fabrication training in Jaipur. According to the reports, it was not Hema but Vidhyadhar who was in debt and took loans from Chintan, Hema and many others.

• On 11 December 2015, Vidhyadhar called Hema claiming that he had evidence against Chintan that would help Hema strengthen her divorce case. Hema along with her lawyer, went to meet Vidhyadhar at his warehouse.

• At the warehouse, Vidhyadhar was accompanied by various other people who planned to scare Hema with a chemical-soaked napkin. They tried to scare her while her lawyer, who tried to help her, was tied with ropes and duct tape. Hema was killed in the process and as her lawyer became a witness of the crime, he was also killed by the culprits.

• Their bodies were stripped of any clothes and were wrapped in transparent polyurethane sheets stuffed in cardboard boxes and thrown in a dump in Kandivali, Mumbai.

• They were found by a sweeper who informed the police and were later identified. After the investigation, all the culprits were arrested by the police and Vidhyadhar was considered the main culprit of the murder; however, Hema’s ex-husband Chintan was not ruled out of the investigation due to his connection with the culprit.

• A few months after her death, she was featured at the Museum of Arts, Boston’s official in the USA.

• Chintan was later taken into custody by Mumbai police. In February 2016, a letter signed by 61 artists in Mumbai was given to the high court to appeal the release of Chintan as there was no evidence against him.

• In October 2023, Chintan along with others was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison by the Dindoshi court in Mumbai.