Important Notice

The present lot belongs to a series of large-scale works, titled Saat Samundar Par ("Across the Seven Seas"), in which Subodh Gupta captures "a mid-migratory point, the no-man's-land that is the airport today... An interstitial point both in space and time, the airport signifies exhilaration and anxiety, the tedious boredom that accompanies the most extreme physical dislocation." (Peter Nagy, "Transitory Indecisions and Fluctuating... The present lot belongs to a series of large-scale works, titled Saat Samundar Par ("Across the Seven Seas"), in which Subodh Gupta captures "a mid-migratory point, the no-man's-land that is the airport today... An interstitial point both in space and time, the airport signifies exhilaration and anxiety, the tedious boredom that accompanies the most extreme physical dislocation." (Peter Nagy, "Transitory Indecisions and Fluctuating Monuments", Subodh Gupta, New Delhi: Nature Morte and Mumbai: Sakshi Gallery, printed in an edition of 2000, p. 6)

Gupta employs a photo-realistic style of painting in this series of works. "The people and backgrounds are rendered in a blocky, two-dimensional shorthand while only the objects of Gupta's ultimate interest, the trolleys with luggage, are fleshed out completely, painted in a realistic manner. As if to say we are nothing more than the commodities we drag around us: 'I Pack Therefore I Am.' Poised upon a wheeled trolley are suitcases and packages that represent a life condensed, the most necessary objects (both in terms of quotidian function and symbolic strengths) are swaddled into vinyl boxes or trussed into bulging bundles." (Nagy, p. 7)

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