Important Notice

In charting India’s recent development, Subodh Gupta creatively draws attention to the present interdigitation of tradition and modernity in the country, and the unique social realities that emerge from their interface along various axes. In doing so, the artist effectively demonstrates the impossibility of capturing the intricacies of the developing world through a developed-world-lens.

Kavita Singh explains, “…over the past ten years,... In charting India’s recent development, Subodh Gupta creatively draws attention to the present interdigitation of tradition and modernity in the country, and the unique social realities that emerge from their interface along various axes. In doing so, the artist effectively demonstrates the impossibility of capturing the intricacies of the developing world through a developed-world-lens.

Kavita Singh explains, “…over the past ten years, Gupta has developed an astonishing capacity to abstract and amplify everyday objects from middle class life. In his works from the last decade, vessels and vehicles undergo transformation in materials or scale, or are massed together into abstract forms that are pleasurable and discomfiting, familiar and strange. What evokes familiarity and what evokes strangeness alters according to the viewer’s location” (Where in the World, Devi Art Foundation exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2008-09, p. 7, 8).

India’s ubiquitous stainless steel kitchen utensils have long fascinated Gupta. Emblematic of the aspirations of the proletariat, the unique path India has taken in its journey towards globalization, and the distinctive place it will always have in the contemporary world, these vessels take on several layers of meaning in Gupta’s large canvases, sculptures and installations. Ideal representatives of the artist’s concerns with material culture, commoditization and objective value, the shiny bowls and buckets also become vehicles for his commentary on mass taste and the values of material production and consumption.

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