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Lot 21

 

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Borrowing at will from the canons of Pop Art and Photorealism, Subodh Gupta's paintings of gleaming kitchenware are theatrical both in their content and in their epic dimensions. Born and raised in Khagaul, Bihar, the artist worked with a local theatre company before he turned to art. According to Peter Nagy, this background in theatre continues to influence the artist's work. He says, "Gupta's works combine a theatrical sense of scale with a... Borrowing at will from the canons of Pop Art and Photorealism, Subodh Gupta's paintings of gleaming kitchenware are theatrical both in their content and in their epic dimensions. Born and raised in Khagaul, Bihar, the artist worked with a local theatre company before he turned to art. According to Peter Nagy, this background in theatre continues to influence the artist's 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" (as quoted 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, New York, 2008, p. 94).

India's ubiquitous stainless steel kitchen utensils have long fascinated Gupta. Emblematic of the aspirations of the proletariat, the unique path India has taken in its journey towards globalization, and the distinctive place it will always have in the contemporary world, these vessels take on several layers of meaning in Gupta's large canvases, including the present lot. Ideal representatives of the artist's concerns with material culture, commoditization and objective value, the shiny bowls and buckets also become vehicles for his commentary on mass taste and the values of material production and consumption.

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