A serendipitous meeting with chess grandmaster Viswanathan Anand has profoundly influenced artist Arvind Sundar's latest exhibition in Mumbai, creating a fascinating dialogue between chess, mathematics, and contemporary art.
The Fateful Encounter That Changed Everything
Last year, a simple Instagram message from a woman in Chennai set in motion an unexpected artistic journey. She reached out to Coimbatore-based artist Arvind Sundar, requesting that he visit her home during his next trip to Chennai. Her 13-year-old son, an aspiring artist, was an ardent admirer of Sundar's mathematically-inspired work.
The teenager's father turned out to be none other than chess legend Viswanathan Anand. What followed was a free-flowing conversation that spanned international art, Marcel Duchamp's fascination with chess, and the deep connections between the game and mathematical principles.
Sundar, a 32-year-old artist who completed his master's in painting and drawing from the University of Cincinnati's School of Art, returned from this meeting deeply inspired. A year later, that chance encounter forms the foundation of his ongoing exhibition, Cosmos II: Chasing Infinity, at Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art Gallery in Colaba, Mumbai.
From Mathematical Grids to Chess Boards
Sundar's artistic practice has long been grounded in mathematical concepts. His earlier works explored geometric shapes, the golden ratio, and showed visible influences from Russian masters like Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky. However, a residency at Hampi Art Labs in 2024 marked a significant turning point.
While in Hampi, the massive landscapes of mounds and valleys appeared to him as fractals when viewed from different vantage points. He also studied the geometric principles embedded in temple architecture. I realized that the architecture of the gopuram of the Virupaksha temple incorporated fractals, Sundar explains. I was also fascinated by the carvings on temple floors, which I found out were gaming boards.
While Hampi provided architectural inspiration, the meeting with Anand brought the strategic dimension of chess into his artistic vocabulary, creating a perfect synthesis of his mathematical interests.
The Knight's Tour and Other Mathematical Marvels
One of the key discussion points during Sundar's meeting with the Anand family was the Knight's Tour - a challenging mathematical problem that has perplexed minds from ancient royal courtiers to modern computer programmers. The problem requires devising a sequence of moves for a knight to visit every square on a chessboard exactly once.
Chess enthusiasts might recall Anand's strategic mastery with knights, particularly during his 2010 World Championship against Veselin Topalov, where he made 13 consecutive knight moves in a single game, prompting jokes that he was attempting to solve the Knight's Tour.
This chess problem directly inspired Knight's Kolam (2025), a large-scale grid comprising 64 individual drawings showing different variations of the Knight's Tour. The work's name references the traditional kolam patterns drawn outside South Indian homes, which similarly involve single-line drawings like the paths created by the knight.
Sundar expands this concept three-dimensionally in Battle of Knights (2025), a zirconium-coated steel sculpture where two knights appear engaged in a dynamic dance, their paths intersecting and diverging in complex patterns.
What captivated me was the staggering number of possible solutions, which are virtually infinite, Sundar notes. I even went beyond the traditional chess board. For larger sizes, the Knight's Tour isn't feasible to solve manually, so I learned Python programming and devised an algorithm to solve the problem faster.
Mythology Meets Mathematics in Arthanareeshwara's Game
Another standout work in the exhibition is Arthanareeshwara's Game (2025), inspired by a well-known Indian parable about a sage who defeated a king in chess. When offered any reward, the sage requested that the king place grains of rice on a chessboard - one grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, doubling each time.
The exponential progression revealed that the total rice required would exceed all the earth's resources, teaching a powerful lesson about humility and mathematical progression. Sundar's interpretation takes the form of a Tower-of-Babel-like sculpture topped by a chess piece modeled on Arthanareeshwara, the composite deity of Shiva and Parvati.
The king represents the passive constant dimension without whom the chess game can't happen, while the queen symbolizes shakti, the energy that drives the game forward, Sundar explains.
A Cosmic Metaphor for Life's Choices
According to historian Sandesh Awdan, by merging chess with mathematics and mythology, Sundar encourages viewers to consider different approaches to understanding cosmic mysteries. The exhibition serves as a powerful metaphor for the choices we face in life, demonstrating how decisions can lead to unique encounters and experiences from nearly infinite possibilities.
Sundar's own experience perfectly illustrates this concept - a single Instagram message led to meeting a chess legend, which in turn transformed his artistic practice and culminated in this sophisticated exploration of strategy, mathematics, and creativity.
The exhibition Cosmos II: Chasing Infinity continues at Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art Gallery in Mumbai until 27 November 2025. This marks Sundar's third solo exhibition at the gallery, representing a significant evolution in his artistic journey that began with mathematical concepts and has now expanded to encompass the strategic depth of chess and mythological wisdom.
