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Lot 94

 

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Touching on issues of development, urbanization and identity, Subodh Gupta’s body of work draws on the artist’s journey from a small town in Bihar to the hyper-urban satellite city of Gurgaon, and poses questions about the homogenizing effects of modernization. Loaded with symbolism, Gupta’s paintings and sculptural installations point out the many fractures and schisms that mark contemporary India as it negotiates a path between local and... Touching on issues of development, urbanization and identity, Subodh Gupta’s body of work draws on the artist’s journey from a small town in Bihar to the hyper-urban satellite city of Gurgaon, and poses questions about the homogenizing effects of modernization. Loaded with symbolism, Gupta’s paintings and sculptural installations point out the many fractures and schisms that mark contemporary India as it negotiates a path between local and global, the self and the world.

The present lot, a predecessor of his Saat Samundar Paar series of paintings, also speaks of displacement, migration and social, geographic and economic mobility, developing some of the stylistic devices that Gupta used in the series. While the ground and surroundings are shadowy and indistinct, the makeshift tent and detritus of homeless living strewn around it are rendered in a sharp, almost photorealistic manner. Referencing one of the unfortunate but inherent effects of the urbanization patterns that emerged in India following its economic liberalization in the early 1990s, this image presents a microcosm of the complex amalgam of modern and traditional, rural and urban, which lies at the core of Gupta’s body of work.

“Gupta paints the markers of this transgression…The people and backgrounds are rendered in a blocky, two-dimensional shorthand while only the objects of Gupta’s ultimate interest…are fleshed out completely, painted in a realistic manner. As if to say that we are nothing more than the commodities we drag around with us: ‘I Pack Therefore I am’…[These commodities] present 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” (Peter Nagy, Subodh Gupta, Bodhi Art exhibition catalogue, 2005, not paginated).

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