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Lot 21

 

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Reflecting on the nuances of stainless steel, and the consequences of Subodh Gupta's adoption of the alloy and its images in his work, Peter Nagy says, “Steel is its own strange doppelganger. Polished it acts as a mirror, tarnished it is opaque. It can be both weapon (sword) and protector (shield), Resistance and Establishment. Piled into accumulations as Subodh treats it, it is coinage and currency, the glittering allure but also the solidity... Reflecting on the nuances of stainless steel, and the consequences of Subodh Gupta's adoption of the alloy and its images in his work, Peter Nagy says, “Steel is its own strange doppelganger. Polished it acts as a mirror, tarnished it is opaque. It can be both weapon (sword) and protector (shield), Resistance and Establishment. Piled into accumulations as Subodh treats it, it is coinage and currency, the glittering allure but also the solidity of capital in its most primal form…Used for a work of art, it communicates a seductive pleasure but also a bankable dependability. To transplant it from the corner of a mud hut in rural Bihar to the top floor of a glamorous art gallery in Bombay questions how any society constructs the meaning and value of anything, how context determines content, and how geography is in fact destiny” (“Subodh Gupta: The Metaphorical Sublime”, Start.Stop, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2005, unpaginated).

In the present lot, Gupta juxtaposes the polished with the tarnished, the new with the old, bringing into focus the dualistic quality of stainless steel that Nagy speaks of, and, by extension, the dualities of life in India following the country’s dramatic economic liberalization in the 1990s. Pushing the viewer to question value, and the unique ways in which it is translated from traditional to contemporary contexts, the artist offers a striking visual of the interior of a trader’s stall, where used vessels and other household goods are weighed and bartered for new ones. A common practice in India, this scene foregrounds the importance of outliers and departures from the flattening norms of globalization, and the immense significance of the local within the ascendant global matrix.

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