Oil on canvas painting entitled Chair—2, created in 1976.  

This image is discoloured.

Excerpt from Geeta Kapur, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Publisher Unknown, 1976: 

'Vivan Sundaram titles this exhibition of pictures The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. We know historically the bougeoisie as a classgains its discretion and its charm only after a certain period of acculturation, only after having sublimated its wealth and acquired some of the taste, if not the instinct of the aristocracy. A colonial bourgeoisie, we should add, is different on account of its special origins and it differs from the western counterpart even in matters of style, which it gains not by genuine effort nor by emulating the local aristocracy but by a more or less abject surrender to foreign influence. Judging by the objects depicted, pile carpet, lace table-cloth, leather chair, snazzy bath-tub. Vivan's reference is presumably to that section of the Indian bourgeoisie that has fulfilled its apprenticeship to the colonial masters and can now boast an international status, living as it does in pent-house apartments and five star hotels. [...] Vivan has a fairly formidable command of the two elements of space and colour and it is in the handling of these he achieves the disorientating effects. [...] In Chair II there is a vertical space extension as the padded leather chair is lowered abruptly into the shaft of an open dungeon with the effect on the viewer almost of vertigo.'

Exhibition history: ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,’ Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University of Baroda; Jawaharlal Nehru University and Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi; Academy of Fine Arts, Calcutta; Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay; 1976, Illustrated catalogue.