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Lot 56

 

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“I am the idol thief. I steal from the drama of Hindu life. And from the kitchen – these pots, they are like stolen gods, smuggled out of the country. Hindu kitchens are as important as prayer rooms. These pots are like something sacred, part of important rituals, and I buy them in a market. They think I have a shop, and I let them think it. I get them wholesale” (Subodh Gupta quoted in C. Mooney, “Subodh Gupta: Idol Thief”, Art Review, 17... “I am the idol thief. I steal from the drama of Hindu life. And from the kitchen – these pots, they are like stolen gods, smuggled out of the country. Hindu kitchens are as important as prayer rooms. These pots are like something sacred, part of important rituals, and I buy them in a market. They think I have a shop, and I let them think it. I get them wholesale” (Subodh Gupta quoted in C. Mooney, “Subodh Gupta: Idol Thief”, Art Review, 17 December 2007, p. 57)

Foregrounding the significance of outliers and departures from the flattening norms of globalization, particularly in relation to commodities, consumption and relative worth, Subodh Gupta`s work values the role and responsibilities of the local within the ascendant global matrix. In reclaiming the politics of place amid the homogenizing convergences of globalization, the artist`s striking images and constructions reveal the “multiple seething growing reality” from which Gupta`s body of work has emerged, and in which it continues to thrive (Nicolas Bourriaud, “On Cultural Precarity: A Letter to Subodh Gupta”, Subodh Gupta, Jack Shainman Gallery, 2008, p. 3). In the present lot, Gupta presents his viewer with a theater of polished pans, milk pails and other shiny, new stainless steel kitchen utensils hanging from lines of rope strung across a store front. Injecting a dose of glamour into the commonplace, the artist gently chides his viewers about the effervescence of appearance and their desires, and, by extension, about the ephemeral nature of consumption as well.

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