How a chance encounter with Viswanathan Anand impacted Arvind Sundar's art practice

A year later, that serendipitous encounter forms the basis for the ongoing exhibition, Cosmos II: Chasing Infinity, at Anupa Mehta Contemporary Art Gallery in Colaba, Mumbai. This is Sundar’s third solo at the gallery. The artist’s earlier work focused on geometric shapes— with the application of related concepts like the golden ratio and visible influence of Russian masters like Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky.

A residency at Hampi Art Labs in 2024 turned into an inflection point. The massive landscapes of mounds and valleys, seen from various vantage points, appeared to him as fractals. Sundar also ended up studying the geometric concepts embedded in temple architecture. “I realised that the architecture of the gopuram of the Virupaksha temple incorporated fractals. I was also fascinated by the carvings on temple floors, which I found out were gaming boards," says Sundar. However, the influence of chess underlying this show comes from the meeting with Anand.

One of the points of conversation during the rendezvous was the “Knight’s Tour", a vexing mathematical problem that has challenged many, from royal courtiers in ancient times to aspiring computer programmers today. It invites one to devise a sequence of moves for a knight so that it touches each square on the chessboard only once in its endeavour to cover the entire board. Chess enthusiasts would be quick to point out Anand’s prowess at strategic deployment of knights in moves and aggressive counterplays. In the 2010 World Championship against Veselin Topalov, he played 13 consecutive moves using his knights in a single game, prompting some to jest that he was trying to solve the Knight’s Tour. Inspired by that chess problem is Knight’s Kolam (2025), a large-scale grid comprising 64 individual drawings of different variations of the Knight’s Tour. The name draws from the traditional patterns made outside homes, which are also single-line drawings like the paths eked out by the knight.

Sundar expands the idea three-dimensionally in another work titled Battle of Knights (2025). In this zirconiumcoated steel sculpture, two knights seem to be engaged in a dance-off, with their moves bringing them into contact at certain points in their journey, while sending them away on divergent paths on others. What captivated Sundar was that the number of possible solutions was staggeringly large and infinite in all but name. “I also went beyond the traditional chess board. For larger sizes, the Knight’s Tour is not feasible to solve manually. So, I learnt Python (the programming language) and devised an algorithm using it to solve the problem faster," says Sundar.

Another work that draws the visitor’s attention is Arthanareeshwara’s Game (2025). This is inspired by a well-known Indian parable. The story goes that a wise sage once defeated a king in a game of chess and was offered any reward he wished for. To teach him a lesson in humility, the sage made a seemingly innocuous request: The king had to fill the chessboard with grains of rice—one grain on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on, doubling the grains in each square. The amount of rice required turned out to be more than the earth could provide. This lesson in the power of exponential progression, and the possibilities embedded in simple actions inspired this work.