Untitled

Subodh Gupta's work depicts the daily life of the bazaars with his quasi-photo realistic rendition of a vessel stall, recasting an ensemble of traditional objects ubiquitous in Modern Indian society. Familiar to both the rural and urban spheres of Indian culture, these shining steel containers are a traditional hallmark of the newly married women and a staple of many Indian homes. Using these icons of Indian culture, Gupta reveals the innate and sometimes fraught dichotomies of rigid Indian social divisions like traditional and modern, rural and urban, wealthy and impoverished. In his paintings, sculptures, as well as installations, Gupta employs these stainless steel implements as a kind of Duchampian readymade, 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.

Mesmerized by the sheen of these quotidian vessels in Gupta's painting, one might recall the vanitas often returned to by Northern European painters in Flanders and the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The utensils represented in these paintings were a celebration of the commerce and the prosperity of their time, while also serving as a comment on the transient nature of beauty. However, the polemics of the "emptiness" within the riches of vessels in the Northern European paintings is an important point of departure for Gupta. His deceptively simple-looking works are wrapped in the high-gloss sheen of the familiar, unremarkable stainless steel forms, are a loving and critical record of modern India, its frequent cultural tumult, and the inherent contradictions of globalization.