Susooh Guprr Ts Onr Or Rur Anosr
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Thc Milk-Pail MLChcLaryclo SusooH GuprR ts oNr or rur Anosr t takes a staggering worid crafted in stainless steel, such as the one of Subodh Gupta's art, for an ordinary tumbler to be EXCITING ARTISTS FROM IN INoIe filled with boundless interpretation. In a 25-year career that RECENT TIMES, HAILED FORTAKING began with a bachelor's degree in painting at the College of Arts and Crafts, Patna, in the Indian state of Bihar, Gupta has HIS SMALL-TOWN SENSIBILITIES stormed art spaces from Miami to Tokyo with his mountainous TO THE cLoBAL STAGE. YeT nT buckets, tabletop cityscapes built with tiffin carriers, apocalyptic heaps of kitchenware and towering edifices of pots THE HEART OF HIS IAW_DROPPING and urns. Such is the terrain of Gupta's art, where a plain, lone steel glass CREATIONS IS A MODEST ASPIRATION would seem oddly mispiaced, if not altogether dwarfed. Then OF EDIFYINC EVERYDAY SIGHTS TO again, the tumbler, and the plates, bowls and pails, are crucial components in Gupta's art, like unit cells that form the basis of THE REFINED STRATA OF HICH ART, his monumental conceptions. SAYS IAIDEEP SEN. The tumbler in question is in the installation A Glass of Water, which was a part of Everything is Insidg a mega mid-career retrospective of the artist held earlier this year at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi. Over the past few years, Gupta has become one of the most recognisable and bankable Indian artists among a new generation that,s pushing the boundaries of new art beyond traditional paintings and sculptures. As one of the largest solo shows by an Indian artist to date in the country, the NGMA exhibition was testament to Gupta's rising status. It also gave enthusiasts a look at the ways in which Gupta derives an inherently Indian essence in his works r be it in super-sized productions or smaller-scale pieces. On the face of i! there's nothing unusual about A Glass of Water, and that is perhaps its most beguiling aspect. placed on a wooden table, the glass is filled to the brim with clear liquid, which threatens to spill and roll over the polished surface - substituting surface tension for high-art suspense - and that,s about it. Indeed, it's an offhanded arrangement that can seem incongruous in the guarded interiors of a museum, but wouldn,t be out of place in any of millions of Indian households. A Glass of Water is probably not among the most-talked- about works of Gupta, who was born in 1964 in the town of Khagaul, Bihar, and now has artisan teams in the US and Europe assembling his creations. Nevertheless, it offers an intimate glimpse into the artist's cultural roots and sensibilities, in a way that many of his gargantuan masterworks don't afford. The glass was, in fact, the headliner piece at Gupta,s 2011 show at the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in New york, where it was exhibited as a work titled Afta (Hindi for,cooking flour,). Propped on another table, Afta resembles a mound of dough, seemingly coarsely kneaded and dusted with flour, as you ,. ?^-- \, -' ,: + \-' I . .,'i-, ,,:qi{ ,t '{ ll 7 might find on any kitchen countertop - except this is a moulded glob of bronze. (Gupta had cast foodstuff to metal earlier, as an Gupta does a Rene Magritte with an attempt to impart a sense of impermanence to the ordinary. Aam installation titled Aadmi (2009), for instance, is of bronze mangoes realistically This is Not a Fountain "One lifetime is not enough to coml painted ripe. There was also Potato Ringthe same year, featuring 697 bronze potatoes.) Within the hushed walls of adulatory art-speak, A Glass of tr4hter elicits a i,r,ealth of interpretations. Hauser & Wirth Callerr', in a release about the show, describes the piece as "a rich metaphor for the almost unbearable tension between luxury and depletion, accumulation and deprivation, acquisition and exhaustion that are the daily diet of exploding international culture". So much for an unremarkable glass filled with water. It is perhaps easier to appreciate Gupta's works under the arc lights extended by a string of record auction-house bids and an enviable circle of patrons, including the French billionaires FranEois Pinault and Bernard Arnault, and England's Charles Saatchi and Frank Cohen. Gupta himself counts the Indian industrialist Russi Mody, Geneva-based art dealer Pierre Huber and Indian gallerist Renu Modi, in addition to the Indian collectors OP Jain and the mother-son duo of Lekha and Anupam Poddar, among those who supported him through his early days. Yet take away the sheen of big money and Gupta's works reveal an unglamorous, slice-of-iife quality that reflects his down-to-earth artistic motivations. His epic projects, to be certairy are the ones that skyrocketed Gupta's profile .1n2006, he filled the cavernous interiors of the St Mary Magdalene Church in Lille, France, with an avalanche of utensils erupting through the baroque arches of the building. Three years later, the attention surrounding Gupta exploded after his showing at the Tate Triennial, London, of Line of Control- a hulking steel mushroom cloud - which received reactions equally welcoming and awe-inspiring. In 2008, Gupta became the youngest Indian artist to enter the million-dollar club at Christie's - one that has long been the domain of a previous generation of Indian artists such as FN Souza, Manjit Bawa, MF Husain, SH Raza and Tyeb Mehta. Soon, with a string of record bids for his installations and incredibly photo-realistic oil canvases, Gupta was placed in an elite group of artists, with the likes of the American Jeff Koons Two But There is Always reflectin and the London-based Anish Kapoor. The buzz escalated when Cinema a nod to artistb i Marcel Duchamp an article in The Guardian showered Gupta with such epithets for carri as "the Damien Hirst of Delhi" and "the Marcel Duchamp of the Subcontinent". Cupta was instantly dubbed the "enfant B terrible of the Indian art scene", a pronouncement that can easily be misinterpreted. The tags were no doubt directed at the nonconformist nature of his work, although Gupta has never been as recusant or dissentient as either Hirst or Duchamp. ry Cupta has steadfastly rejected such citations, even as he riffed on them in works like Hungry God (now in Pinault's collection), a take on For the Love o{ God Hirst's eye-popping skull of platinum and diamonds. In Ef tu Duchamp, Gupta set the French-American iconoclast's doodle of a moustachioed *'-- r#fi;t Mona Lisa in a bronze bus! while ,[e.f ffie Koons takes a swipe at shipments of Koons' mail-order puppies. At the NGMA show, Gupta also brought in lftere rs Always Cinema, comprised of two lavatory commodes, one made of bronze and the other of porcelain - again, a patent nod to Duchamp. In earlier interaction with the press, Gupta stated that he found such comparisons to be the handiwork of "journalists who know the least about art". In an interview for this article, Gupta again played down the suggestions. "My message is not to the media, not to the audience, not to anyone in particular - but yet it is for everyone. My work, my art is my message," he said. The NGMA exhibition was significant as a sort of homecoming for Gupta, agrees Peter Nagy, the owner of Delhi's Callerv Nature Morte, who has been closely associated with 30 alphamagazine.ae I May 2014 Gupta (and Cupta's artist-wife Bharti Kher) over the vears. "The show helped the general perception of Subodh's rvork," said Nagy in an email exchange. Most of these works had never been shown in India earlier, and were brought together from various collections for the first time, he noted. Gupta's long-standing preoccupation with issues of migration and displacement were evidenced in works employing luggage trolleys and an assortment of bags cast in aluminirm. Everything is lnside (2004), the piece that lent its title to the show, manifests the theme in a lopped-off top of a taxi, apparently weighed down and sunken into the floor by a roof-rack full of luggage. Installations like these divulge Gupta's affinity for carrier- vehicles, as attested in Cheap Rice, a cycle rickshaw overloaded with metalware, in addition to works involving bicycles, a scooter, and life-size Royal Enfield motorcycles - each fastened with milk pails, and wholly cast in metal. Ai1in the Same Boat, a variation of an earlier work, depicts the act of journeying with an actual fishing boat packed with all sorts of knick-knacks and even a few ceiling fans. Among Gupta's older works on display were My Mother and Me (1999), a full-size hut made of dung cakes, and Bilrari (1999 again), a subverted self-portrait smeared in dung, with a neon sign spelling out the iitle in the Devanagari script. Dada (2074), a spraivling tree of utensils, was among the show,'s new works, while the most political of the lot was Tfte Way Home II* littered with more kitchenware and a handful of toy pistols, watched over bv a fibreglass cow - ostensibly directed at affairs in his home state. The NGMA shon'r.r,as important as it let "other artists see why Subodh's work has received so much attention outside India", says Nagy. Of course, manv others have helped boost the visibility of Indian contemporarv art on the international stage, he points out: "To name a fet', Amar Kanw,ar, Shilpa Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Dayanita Singh, Sheela Gowda." As for Gupta, 'As he became well-known internationally, this caused him to look into his own background and life more closely for inspiration," Nagy reasons.