.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Subodh Gupta draws heavily from his own experience in culling material for his art, recasting traditional objects of Indian culture in contemporary media and contexts. The artist has an uncanny ability to identify those icons of Indian culture that posses innate dichotomies suggesting both the traditional and modern, the rural and urban, the wealthy and the impoverished. He uses clichés such as the cow and its dung, the colonial style Ambassador car, the rickshaw, and the stainless steel utensils of a typical South Asian kitchen to comment on larger social ills of discrimination, caste politics, globalization, industrialization, and religious tensions.
Filtering through his cache of symbols, the stainless steel bucket is an iconic emblem of Gupta's work and epitomizes his ability to find tension and irony in the mundane. The artist regularly employs the stainless steel bucket, using its form in both painting and as a kind of Duchampian ready-made. Familiar to both the rural and urban echelons of Indian society, these shining steel containers are a ubiquitous element in the trousseau of newly married women and a staple of many Indian homes. Predominantly, however, these quotidian vessels are used by middle-class Indians as dishes and cooking implements in place of the porcelain china used in upper-class western cultures. They are also objects of desire for the underclasses. Gupta is particularly sensitive to this societal stratum as Bihar, his hometown, is associated with backwardness and lawlessness. The artist has recast dishes, pots, and pans in a number of incarnations, piling them into the shape of temples, hanging them precariously from the ceiling and, in the spirit of Claes Oldenburg, magnifying a single pail to mammoth proportions.
In Giant Leap of Faith Gupta appropriates a simple pail used for bathing and washing, stacking vessel upon vessel to construct a gleaming tower of kitchenware. The work, loosely reminiscent of historical obelisks and columns built as monuments to personal, political, and religious greatness, was shown within the context of many such western memorials on the Champs-Elysées in an installation mounted in 2006. Curator and artist Peter Nagy suggests that Gupta's "primary sculptural vocabulary takes clues from the commemorative, [and is] often reminiscent of the charmingly naïve figures of concrete which stand stoically in the middle of round-a-bouts in small towns all over India (in that he is inspired by both the statue and the swirl of activity surrounding it)" (P. Nagy, Subodh Gupta, exh. cat, Nature Morte, Mumbai, p. 6). In monumentalizing the bucket, Gupta merges high and low, wryly commenting on the veneration now given to products of industrialization. At a moment when India is moving away from its Gandhian and socialist ideals toward a more capitalistic and consumerist culture, Gupta glorifies both the banality and the vulgarity of the everyday, while cleverly celebrating the convenience afforded by mass production in a towering seven meter tall monument.
Gupta's ongoing investigation into local traditions, objects, and visual idioms as India faces rapid cultural, social, and economic changes has made him one of the most prominent Indian artists in the contemporary art world. As Nagy suggests, "by continuing to focus on emblems of everyday India, symbols which straddle the rural and urban scenarios, Gupta flirts with the sentimentality which still propels much of what registers as contemporary art in India today. The majority of India's commercial art galleries and public exhibition spaces are stocked with works that depict scenes of village India...idealized Rajasthani women...bullock driven ploughs...and bucolic fields dotted with temples. What is produced in effect, is an indigenous Orientalism, one that portrays a rural ideal that is superficial and sanitized...Subodh Gupta's project, then, is bold in its attempt to directly confront these loaded points where the city collides with the village, when the contemporary cannibalizes the traditional" (Ibid., p. 8).
Filtering through his cache of symbols, the stainless steel bucket is an iconic emblem of Gupta's work and epitomizes his ability to find tension and irony in the mundane. The artist regularly employs the stainless steel bucket, using its form in both painting and as a kind of Duchampian ready-made. Familiar to both the rural and urban echelons of Indian society, these shining steel containers are a ubiquitous element in the trousseau of newly married women and a staple of many Indian homes. Predominantly, however, these quotidian vessels are used by middle-class Indians as dishes and cooking implements in place of the porcelain china used in upper-class western cultures. They are also objects of desire for the underclasses. Gupta is particularly sensitive to this societal stratum as Bihar, his hometown, is associated with backwardness and lawlessness. The artist has recast dishes, pots, and pans in a number of incarnations, piling them into the shape of temples, hanging them precariously from the ceiling and, in the spirit of Claes Oldenburg, magnifying a single pail to mammoth proportions.
In Giant Leap of Faith Gupta appropriates a simple pail used for bathing and washing, stacking vessel upon vessel to construct a gleaming tower of kitchenware. The work, loosely reminiscent of historical obelisks and columns built as monuments to personal, political, and religious greatness, was shown within the context of many such western memorials on the Champs-Elysées in an installation mounted in 2006. Curator and artist Peter Nagy suggests that Gupta's "primary sculptural vocabulary takes clues from the commemorative, [and is] often reminiscent of the charmingly naïve figures of concrete which stand stoically in the middle of round-a-bouts in small towns all over India (in that he is inspired by both the statue and the swirl of activity surrounding it)" (P. Nagy, Subodh Gupta, exh. cat, Nature Morte, Mumbai, p. 6). In monumentalizing the bucket, Gupta merges high and low, wryly commenting on the veneration now given to products of industrialization. At a moment when India is moving away from its Gandhian and socialist ideals toward a more capitalistic and consumerist culture, Gupta glorifies both the banality and the vulgarity of the everyday, while cleverly celebrating the convenience afforded by mass production in a towering seven meter tall monument.
Gupta's ongoing investigation into local traditions, objects, and visual idioms as India faces rapid cultural, social, and economic changes has made him one of the most prominent Indian artists in the contemporary art world. As Nagy suggests, "by continuing to focus on emblems of everyday India, symbols which straddle the rural and urban scenarios, Gupta flirts with the sentimentality which still propels much of what registers as contemporary art in India today. The majority of India's commercial art galleries and public exhibition spaces are stocked with works that depict scenes of village India...idealized Rajasthani women...bullock driven ploughs...and bucolic fields dotted with temples. What is produced in effect, is an indigenous Orientalism, one that portrays a rural ideal that is superficial and sanitized...Subodh Gupta's project, then, is bold in its attempt to directly confront these loaded points where the city collides with the village, when the contemporary cannibalizes the traditional" (Ibid., p. 8).