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 abroad in Australia for the first time. She created a work titled ‘The Nymph and the Adult’, for this, she sculpted approximately 2000 lifelike cockroaches.
  

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

• 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 Hanger 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 ongoing 2009 – 2011 Vancouver Biennale for three weeks to create a performance artwork titled Loco-Foco-Motton that resulted in the creation of six vortex-like chandeliers composed of 750,000 unlit coloured matchsticks.

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

• In 2010, she also received a residency invite from the Atelier Calder, Sache, France. During her time there, she created an artwork titled “Only Memory has Preservatives” which was a replica of a forest and she created it using copyright-free images of various trees found in the area, she created a landscape work 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 at the Faculty of Fine Arts Baroda, and Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi in 2012, Mute Migration at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia in 2012, and Where the bees suck, there suck I at the Reopening of MACRO museum in Rome, Italy in 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 after a prolonged period of fighting for the divorce. 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.

• After their divorce in 2014, Chintan moved to Delhi and Hema began residing at their flat on the Tara-Juhu 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 tried to help her they tied him with ropes and duct tape; however, 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.

• Chintan was also 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.

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