Subodh Gupta

Private Collection, Mumbai

Delhi, Nature Morte, Subodh Gupta: Hungry God, 2006

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a loss to one of the sticks to the lower right (visible in the catalogue illustration) and a further two losses to the ends of the sticks within the bundle. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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One of the prevailing characteristics of contemporary Indian society and culture is the paradoxical marriage of archaic traditions with new technology. This clash of co-existing realities within the Indian contemporary arts has created an exciting and flourishing trajectory in the domain of sculpture. Nowhere is this more profoundly realised than in the work of Subodh Gupta - an artist whose internationally celebrated body of work draws its inspiration and vocabulary from poor, rural India and renders it through the slick vernacular languages of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art. Nicknamed the 'Damien Hirst of Delhi', Gupta is a self-confessed idol thief whose work plumbs the rhetoric of marginality in sculptures that criticise and capitalise upon the globalized commodification of art and life. Typically fashioned from pots, pans and everyday objects - such as the bundle of sticks in Fire - cast in aluminium, his work oscillates between diverse visual languages and displays a tenderness and humour not previously encountered in the Indian tradition. Its material humility and beauty transcends faiths and borders to appeal on a universal level. "Art language is the same all over the world," says Gupta, "which allows me to be everywhere." (the artist cited in: ArtReview, December 2007, p. 57)