subodh gupta

Rather than exhibiting sealed solutions to the paradoxes of everyday life in contemporary India, Subodh Gupta unpacks and recycles its contents. Over the past fifteen years, his paintings, sculptures, and installations have manipulated ordinary household objects to aestheticize a shifting dialogue between rural and urban, embodied also by the artist's own autobiography. Born in Khagaul, Bihar and educated at the Patna College of Art, Gupta has since 1990 lived and worked in Delhi. A transition in the artist's materials from organic (especially cow dung) to manufactured (including Ambassador cars) has traced his own migration to the mainstream art culture of urban India.

Gupta's talent has consistently been to project Indian objects and iconographies in a global language of found objects, postmodern assemblage, and conceptual art. The artist's employ of organic materials has dovetailed especially with sculptural movements of the late 20th century, as American artists like Martin Puryear and David Hammons transformed everyday items into the central fixtures of process art.

Beginning in The Way Home, a solo exhibition at Gallery Chemould in Bombay in 1999, Subodh Gupta has cooked a grand vision out of common kitchens. The eponymous work from that show offered a floor arrangement of the metal utensils and cookware universal to all regions and strata of Indian society; this surrounded a central red BJP lotus and selectively set metal guns, both referring to politics and violence specific to Gupta's home state. In the now iconic Bihari, of the same exhibition and year, Gupta identifies and labels himself - in Hindi script using LED lights, setting his painted portrait against a background of textured cow dung.

Since then, Gupta has continually positioned his own identity against local, national, and global contexts. Pure (1999), Gupta's first experiment with video art, chronicled a shower that rinsed layers of cow dung off of his own nude body. His projects have deconstructed objects already loaded with the symbolism of transition in India, as with the installation of a bronzed milk-delivery scooter in This Side is the Other Side (2002) and an aluminum airport conveyor belt in Across Seven Seas (2006). For an installation in Paris' Eglise Saint-Bernard in 2006, he crafted A Very Hungry God, a spectacular, monumental skull balanced from steel objects. The work was so dramatically received that the city requested it to remain beyond its planned installation; for a special exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi, Venice beginning in May 2007, the work was installed dramatically outside of the building, facing a canal.

Beth Citron