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Lot 56

 

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Subodh Gupta’s emergence as an artist in the 1990s coincided with several significant local and global socioeconomic transformations that manifestly altered the lives of people in India. As geographical borders became increasingly nominal and the Indian economy opened its windows to the world, the aspirations and mobility of the newly-affluent Indian middle class soared to previously unimagined heights.

Gupta, born in the small railway... Subodh Gupta’s emergence as an artist in the 1990s coincided with several significant local and global socioeconomic transformations that manifestly altered the lives of people in India. As geographical borders became increasingly nominal and the Indian economy opened its windows to the world, the aspirations and mobility of the newly-affluent Indian middle class soared to previously unimagined heights.

Gupta, born in the small railway town of Khagaul, Bihar in 1964, works in a wide variety of media including painting, sculpture, performance, video and photography. In his large-scale sculptural installations like the present lot, the artist charts the frictions that have resulted from the recent social and geographical migrations of ‘the great Indian middle-class’, raising issues of identity, stereotyping, consumerism, the assignation of subjective values to particular goods, and the persistence of unique patterns of production and consumption. In so doing, the artist effectively underscores the distinctiveness and complexity of each country and community’s development, negating single-model hypotheses.

To reflect India’s unique growth and to voice his concerns about the new and undefined interstitial spaces that have come to exist between modernity and tradition, city and country, Gupta has fittingly chosen one of India’s most unique commodities as his medium: the shiny stainless-steel kitchenware that is a familiar sight in homes and stores across the country. "For more than ten years, Subodh Gupta has been using the common steel goods of Indian kitchens as one of the primary materials for his art…Outside of India, in the world capitals of New York, London, Paris and Tokyo, where culture is capital and artistic expression is the highest form of entrepreneurship, these steel objects look to be revelatory, as they certainly are in their superb encapsulation of form, function, materiality and economic rationality. Inside of India, these objects may appear as unsophisticated, old-fashioned, awkward and, to many, embarrassing and indicative of the inherited weight of the past (including poverty, the caste system, rampant corruption and a lugubrious Socialist State). The success of Subodh’s sculptures using these objects is not this either/or situation…but that their meaning and reception in either locale emphasizes this crisis of identity India is now experiencing, both for itself and how it is perceived by others” (Peter Nagy, "Subodh Gupta: The Metaphorical Sublime”, START.STOP, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2007, unpaginated).

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