Subodh Gupta

Born 1964 Khagaul, India.
Lives and works in New Delhi, India.

«Subodh Gupta subjects his artworks - mainly installations, sculptures or paintings - to a strategic process of multiple encoding. While his source materials are emblematic objects of everyday life in India, they may be interpreted differently in other geographical contexts and are also given new meaning when filtered through the system of Western aesthetics. Spill (2007), for example, has lots of small stainless steer pots and bowls spilling out of a large, shiny bucket. It is in fact a larger-than-life milk pail and the other objects are cooking or eating utensils; as such they form part of India's gastronomic culture with its sacred and ritual connotations, but they could also be regarded as representative of Indian culture as a whole. In the form of an artwork they become a sculpture with strong references to pop art and the readymade. For Gupta however, it is not about the gesture of elevating utilitarian objects to the level of artworks, but about the multiple meanings such objects have. In the installation Silk Road (2007), for instance, countless pots and pans have been piled up into shiny silvery towers, which together evoke a futuristic urban landscape, while in Gupta's recent paintings, entitled Still Steal Steel (2007-) or left untitled, utensils are depicted in a virtuoso, hyperrealist  style of painting reminiscent of American photorealism. By combining themes from his Indian homeland with stylistic references to recent US art history and by harnessing the tension that arises when country and city, tradition and change, specifically local and standardized global interest collide, Gupta's work convincingly reflects the complex nature of contemporary Indian society.» Astrid Mania