feature subodh gupta
transforms them into recognisable trademarks. If Mondrian owns
geometry, Beuys felt and Duchamp urinals – as a poster in my groovy
neighbourhood café attests – then Gupta owns cow-dung patties, milk
buckets, cooking pots and tiffin carriers.
“Subodh is very good at selecting icons and symbols,” says
Peter Nagy, whose Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi, along with
the Bose Pacia Gallery in New York, where Nagy is director, have
been instrumental in bringing South Asian artists to the attention of
Western curators and collectors (like most contemporary India artists,
Gupta is better represented in Western than Indian collections, and
especially within the Indian diaspora).
“There is something of the way Gandhi worked here,” says Nagy.
“Gandhi used the very simple elements of salt or homespun cotton to
overturn a colonial empire. Subodh uses pots, bicycles and milk pails
to talk about the great changes occurring in India today. We’ve just
passed the hump – most Indians no longer live in villages and make
their living off agriculture. And these symbols that Subodh uses act as
flashpoints for this in-between moment.”
There is nothing simple, however, about Idol Thief’s Rosenquist
polish. Nagy’s reading reflects the conventional take on contemporary
“i’m n o t h a p p y w i t h m y p a i n t i n g ,” Subodh Gupta says as we stop art from the subcontinent (in an email response to a request to
in front of a large canvas during a pre-opening walkthrough at In Situ, elaborate on the Gandhi analogy, Nagy demurred by writing, ‘Would
Paris. If he’s not happy, others are: at auctions this year, similar Gupta rather not go on about the Gandhian similarities; bit of a cliché
canvases sold for more than £100,000 apiece. The paintings help round these parts’). What is interesting about Gupta is the smart-art
finance more ambitious projects – 27 Light Years (2007), for example, specifics of his transfiguration of the everyday – the Plexiglas box, the
the giant cooking-pot rocket installed on the grounds of the Whitworth art-fabricated painting, sculpture and installation, and especially the
Art Gallery in Manchester this summer; and Very Hungry God (2006), sharply nuanced quotation of the contemporary art canon. Magic
the giant cooking-pot human skull currently floating on Venice’s Grand Wands (2002), for example, uses 50 aluminium poles cast from walking
Canal in front of François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi. sticks leaning up against a wall – just like the 50 fibreglass-and-resin
The only Indian artist in this magazine’s ‘Power 100’ list (at no. poles of Eva Hesse’s Accretion (1968). Untitled 3 (2005), a six-foot
85) and Beaux Art Magazine’s ‘The French Like Contemporary Art’ steel bucket first seen at the Frieze Art Fair two years ago and now in
poll (at no. 3), Gupta is out at the forefront of South Asia’s current Bernard Arnault’s collection, is the South Asian equivalent of a giant
contemporary art boom. Jean-Pierre Reynaud flowerpot. Giant Leap of Faith (2006) is a vertical
Still, here he is in his Paris gallery on the eve of a solo show – stack of metal buckets reminiscent of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless
the first of three in the West between now and May – with his head Column (1918). Bihari (1998), a cow-dung painting, inevitably calls for
cocked to one side, eyeing his painting critically. Price tag aside, Gupta, comparisons to Chris Ofili’s elephant versions.
who started as a painter before branching into installation, video,
performance and, finally, the large-scale sculpture for which he is best
known today, is not satisfied. “It’s too polished,” he says. “I want to
change it. I’m not there yet. I want to give it something more.”
The painting in question is Idol Thief (2007), and it is indeed
polished, like the gleaming pots represented within its frame. Executed
by Gupta’s New Delhi assistant in high-Pop photorealist style, it looks
resolutely American, almost like a James Rosenquist – extreme-close-
up surfaces in glossy LA-sunset colours. If I had never seen a work by
Gupta before, and if I hadn’t been told that those pots were stackable
stainless-steel tiffin pots – “the kind in which 90 percent of India carries
its lunch”, says Gupta – and if there wasn’t a gigantic sushi conveyor
belt on the gallery floor behind us covered with slow-moving towers
of the same, I would never have identified the painting as Indian. And
being Indian without being identified as Indian is exactly what the
painting is about.
What, in a contemporary art context, is ‘Indianness’? What, in
an Indian context, is contemporary art? Scattered somewhere among
these types of questions lies the resonating power of Gupta’s art and
identity, which cleverly twains East and West through an elegant
displacement of developing- and art-world references.
Other young South Asian artists ironise or sentimentalise
Indian iconography and stereotypes, but Gupta alone successfully
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