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Lot Essay
In the 1990s and 2000s, Subodh Gupta produced a distinct body of work concerned with the effects of urbanization and globalization on the rural communities of North India. With migration as the focal point, he contemporized issues that have affected India since colonial times, connecting them with global concerns, while also conceptually linking vernacular visual cultures of India with Pop Art and the work of Western artists like Marcel Duchamp, Josef Beuys, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.
In his series of paintings, sculptures and installations known as Saat Samundar Paar (Across the Seven Seas), Gupta focuses on the global phenomenon of migrant labor through the journeys of Indian workers to various parts of the world. Photorealist paintings of airport scenes featuring luggage and trolleys and cast metal replicas of these objects become metaphors for the hopes and dreams invested in these journeys, as well as the psychological baggage borne by migrant workers battling with homesickness, maltreatment, alienation and assimilation.
An oblique commentary on class inequity, Gupta’s works in this series directly allude to the less-than-ideal conditions of migrant laborers from India’s lower classes as they toil to make a living in other countries. This also has antecedents in the history of Bihar, the artist’s impoverished home state, which has been home to a large percentage of India’s population of migrant workers for over a hundred years, first as bonded labor shipped off to far-flung colonies such as Mauritius and the West Indies in the mid-19th century, and then as workers scrounging to pay their way to the Middle East and Southeast Asia in search of gainful employment. Gupta, who grew up in a railway enclave in Khagaul, Bihar, would have been witness to the quiet tragedy, theatre and drama of these workers' journeys to and from their homeland in search of a brighter future.
In his series of paintings, sculptures and installations known as Saat Samundar Paar (Across the Seven Seas), Gupta focuses on the global phenomenon of migrant labor through the journeys of Indian workers to various parts of the world. Photorealist paintings of airport scenes featuring luggage and trolleys and cast metal replicas of these objects become metaphors for the hopes and dreams invested in these journeys, as well as the psychological baggage borne by migrant workers battling with homesickness, maltreatment, alienation and assimilation.
An oblique commentary on class inequity, Gupta’s works in this series directly allude to the less-than-ideal conditions of migrant laborers from India’s lower classes as they toil to make a living in other countries. This also has antecedents in the history of Bihar, the artist’s impoverished home state, which has been home to a large percentage of India’s population of migrant workers for over a hundred years, first as bonded labor shipped off to far-flung colonies such as Mauritius and the West Indies in the mid-19th century, and then as workers scrounging to pay their way to the Middle East and Southeast Asia in search of gainful employment. Gupta, who grew up in a railway enclave in Khagaul, Bihar, would have been witness to the quiet tragedy, theatre and drama of these workers' journeys to and from their homeland in search of a brighter future.