What happens when 64 squares become a portal to the infinite? For the Coimbatore-based artist Arvind Sundar, whose solo exhibition Chasing Infinity opened at Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art in Mumbai in October 2025, the answer lies in the chessboard — a finite space holding near-infinite possibilities. Following his critically acclaimed Cosmos (2024), which drew on the sacred landscapes of Hampi, Sundar turns his gaze to a different terrain: the calculated geometry of chess, where mathematics, mythology, and materiality converge in a meditation on existence itself.
In Sundar’s hands, the chessboard becomes a permutation of play. Within its strict confines, he discovers an unbounded arena where the smallest gestures, such as a knight’s manoeuvre or the doubling of a single grain, unfold into cosmic proportions, hinting at numerical immensities almost impossible to comprehend.
“Years ago, I had an hour-long conversation with grandmaster Viswanathan Anand about chess and the mathematics underlying the game,” Sundar recalls. An avid player himself, the exchange transformed his entire approach to the board. “[Anand’s] insight completely transformed my perspective. I rediscovered chess — not as a game of strategy alone, but as a vast landscape of mathematical beauty waiting to be explored through art.”
The conversations revealed unexpected intersections. “Once, [Anand] showed me a remarkable knight manoeuvre played by Praggnanandhaa during a practice match with him. The elegance of that move felt like a perfect visual motif, which I later incorporated into one of my works,” he shares. “Another time, Anand narrated the famous fable of the rice grain and the chessboard — a story that beautifully illustrates concepts of geometric progression and exponential growth — I eventually created a sculpture inspired by it.”
1: Titled: Cosmic Moves – 1; 2: Titled: Battle of Knights
Born in 1993, Sundar’s practice roots itself in geometry, grids, and mathematical systems, a language he cultivated through formal training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Cincinnati. His spiritual and physical connectedness to these systems manifests across paintings, drawings, and sculptural objects. During his time in Italy, exposure to Renaissance art and sculpture deepened his understanding of sacred geometry. Yet it is in his recent explorations that mythology enters his vocabulary, creating a synthesis of the ancient and the abstract.
Chess grandmaster Anand acknowledges the resonance between these worlds. “Chess and art are both very big, beyond our comprehension. What is fascinating to me is that I’ve been playing chess my whole life, but there always seems to be a fresh layer to unveil and to understand,” he notes. “Looking at two distinct worlds that behave like this — one familiar to you and the other not, and finding connections between the two is very thought-provoking.”
Through his art, Sundar visualises the interplay between calculation and chance, and form and formlessness, suggesting how mathematical progression can reveal cosmic truths. What distinguishes this exhibition from a simple intellectual exercise is its tactile intimacy. These are works that invite the body to comprehend what the mind struggles to grasp. In Ardhanareeshwara’s Game, a wooden chessboard rises in ascending squares, each elevation illustrating exponential growth, the ancient parable of rice doubling with each square made tangible. A single grain rests on the first square. On the 64th stands Ardhanareeshwara, the hybrid king-queen figure uniting Shiva and Shakti. The divine convergence marks where near-infinite numbers meet mythological unity, reflecting on how all dualities resolve into oneness. The piece succeeds precisely because it makes the vertiginous graspable, allowing viewers to feel the weight of exponential progression in their bones.
In another piece, Cosmic Movies – 1, Sundar extends the chessboard into a circle, transforming its rigid geometry into a window onto possibility itself. The two kings — principal opponents whose presence animates the entire game — become a metaphor for the forces of duality that sustain the universe. Their interplay gives rise to all moves, possibilities, and the manifold cosmos itself. Its circular form suggests both completion and continuation, an otherworldly wheel where every ending is a new beginning.
Arvind Sundar, Chasing Infinity, gallery views from Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art
Chasing Infinity strips chess of its competitiveness, converting it into an act of contemplation. In a series of 64 drawings, Sundar traces the path of a knight, a piece that dances where reason walks, across the board. Each drawing stands as an individual expression. Yet collectively they gesture toward the trillions of unique paths a knight can take to traverse the entire board. His work embodies the tension between singularity and multiplicity and the personal and the universal, rooted in individuality and daring to become symbolic. Here lies perhaps the exhibition’s most compelling proposition: that repetition and constraint can breed infinite variation, and limitation becomes the very condition of freedom.
The artist, whose practice has evolved through over fifty exhibitions, continues to explore the languages through which we approach the mysteries of existence. His latest exhibition operates with a daring intent: to encourage dialogue on cosmology through a lexicon that feels familiar and accessible, reminding viewers that the laws of cosmology shape our daily lives as profoundly as the laws of politics and economics. There is something subtly subversive in his approach — the suggestion that we need metaphors and materials, not just equations, to truly comprehend our place in the universe.
Chasing Infinity asks us to reconsider what games can teach us about existence. Divorced from ranking and victory, the chessboard becomes a site of introspection. Arvind Sundar’s invitation is simple yet profound: to play without competing, to calculate without conquest, and to discover that the most bounded systems might be doorways to the boundless.
Image Courtesy Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art
