Important Notice

Subodh Gupta, born and raised in Khagaul, Bihar, worked with a theatre company before he turned to fine art. According to Peter Nagy, the artist’s background in theatre continues to influence his work. He says, “Gupta's works combine a theatrical sense of scale with a performative aspect, be it his own or that of the audience...His art seeks to energise all that we encounter and forces us to re-evaluate our own aesthetic parameters. He has found... Subodh Gupta, born and raised in Khagaul, Bihar, worked with a theatre company before he turned to fine art. According to Peter Nagy, the artist’s background in theatre continues to influence his work. He says, “Gupta's works combine a theatrical sense of scale with a performative aspect, be it his own or that of the audience...His art seeks to energise all that we encounter and forces us to re-evaluate our own aesthetic parameters. He has found a way to speak of the local to the global and to teach the disenfranchised the language of the empowered” (rpt. in S. Kalidas, “Vessels of Plenty”, India Today, March 2007).

In his exploration of globalization and its effects on the local, primarily the emergence of a new Indian middle-class, Gupta’s main concerns have been subjective value and material production and consumption. In charting and presenting India’s unique developmental path, the artist creatively draws attention to the present interdigitation of tradition and modernity in the country, and the distinct social realities that emerge from this interface. In doing so, Gupta effectively communicates the impossibility of capturing the intricacies of the developing world through a developed-world-lens. Simultaneously, however, the artist pinpoints the rapidly multiplying planes of convergence between the local and the global, the self and the other. In the words of the critic S. Kalidas, through his art, “Subodh Gupta nimbly seeks to stride the trapeze so tenuously stretched between the poco-pomo global and the naïve-kitsch Bihari local with the panache of a mad man, a magician or a prophet” (“Of Capacities and Containment: Poetry and politics in the art of Subodh Gupta”, Subodh Gupta: Gandhi’s Three Monkeys, Jack Shainman Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2008, p. 94).

Using familiar symbols of middle class life in India as his main vehicle in this straddling interrogation, the artist turns everyday kitchens and stores into shimmering theatres of polished stainless steel pots and pans. Emblematic of the aspirations of the proletariat, these shiny utensils reflect developing India’s distinctive brand of materiality. Here, the term ‘commoditized existence’ takes on new, culture-specific meaning, as value is not assigned to flashy clothes and fast cars, but to gleaming buckets, bowls and tiffin-boxes.

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