S.Kalidas' Archive

Subodh Gupta: Global Native

By S, Kalidas

There is a new bartan-walla (utensil seller) from the backyards of Patna who is 'wow'-ing international art curators and collectors from Paris to Singapore. With his amazingly imaginative sculptural forms of human skulls and UFOs— made of kitchen utensils— being snapped up by serious European collectors like Pierre Huber (the visionary Geneva gallerist and collector),  Francois Pinault (who owns Gucci, Balenciaga and the Christie’s besides other brands) and Bernard Arnauld (of LVMH, the group that owns Luis Vuitton among other businesses), Subodh Gupta, 43, is making making a niche for himself and for Indian Art in spaces where few Indian artists have made a dent in the past.

“He is quite fantastic and hugely desirable. As Husain was the ambassador of Indian art abroad in the 1960s and ’70s, today it is Subodh who is the new face of Indian art globally,” says Sharmishtha Ray, manager of the Bodhi Art gallery in Mumbai, where Gupta’s latest offerings are on view till the end of the month. More significantly, Gupta is appealing not to the expected crowd of Indophiles and orientalists (they are in fact a bit bewildered by his sudden success) in the west but mainstream museums,  galleries and art fairs where few Indians, including Husain, have tread before.

Gupta’s work these days is all about surprise and scale: Huge monumental works that inspire awe while evoking amazement. His current show in Mumbai, for example, has only four objects— the UFO (uran khatola) made of brass lotas (common Indian water vessel) some four metres across in diameter, a simple “door-to-nowhere” cast in brass, a corner piece collage of steel utensils and his piece de resistance, the ‘tiffin-box sushi belt’. “I love food and I cook it too… in a manner of speaking I use utensils as a metaphor for food and the way it has travelled across cultures and countries in my work,” says Gupta. Interestingly, the fundamental concept of rasa (essence, juice, mood) in Indian aesthetics is food-inspired too. His earlier works have been made of milk cans and buckets, some of them GIANT milk cans and towers of buckets rising high into the sky.

Last year for just a 12-hour showing during la Nuit Blanche (White Night) in Paris Gupta combined his culinary skills and sculptural art to great effect. He was asked to create an installation at the church of St. Bernard in north Paris which was occupied by  hundreds of  immigrants in 1997 in what was called the movement “sans papiers” to protest against the change in immigration laws that made the status of thousands of French residents illegal. “It was a house of god and the site of protests by immigrants,” recalls Gupta, “I also remembered an episode from our own scriptures where a whole forest was once cut down to appease the hunger of one of our gods. So I thought of serving soup cooked by me to all visitors and make a mammoth human skull from dabbas (boxes) and baltis (pails).” The work titled A Very Hungry God took three months to construct and was snapped up by Pinault in a pre-breakfast viewing that lasted just 15 minutes for an alleged 500,000 Euros.

Born in Khargaul, a small village in Bihar, Gupta lost his railway man father when still young. As a teenager, he joined a street theatre group where apart from acting, he also designed posters and brochures. His sense of design caught the eye of a mentor in who got him admitted to the Patna Art College. After passing out from art college he came to delhi in 1987 and after a decade of struggle and trying to find his feet in the art world was discovered by Khoj, an international artists’ workshop in Delhi and Peter Nagy, an artist, curator and critic who runs the cutting edge Nature Morte gallery. According to Nagy, “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.” Lately, Gupta is being promoted by the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud and gallerist Fabienne Leclerc who have been placing him at important European venues.

Vibrantly imaginative yet firmly rooted in his ethos, Subodh Gupta straddles the native and the global without the least self-consciousness. Not unlike his fellow Bihari, Lalu Yadav in politics, Gupta, too, is bound to serve up more surprises in future.