Subodh Gupta (b.1964)

Christie's, New York, 30 March 2006, lot 163

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Distant Nearness, March - May, 2008

Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Chalo India, November 2008 - March 2009

National Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, Chalo India, April - June 2009

Essl Museum, Vienna, Chalo India, September - November 2009 

Very good condition. Minor surface abrasions, as to be expected.
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Subodh Gupta's towering installation "OK Mili", composed of more than 400 hanging stainless steel tiffin boxes, transforms this everyday household object into an epic, ironic, postmodern objet d'art. This use of meta-commentary through transformation of the mundane has become Gupta's hallmark. As Gupta explains, "The objects I pick already have their own significance. I put them together to create new meanings."

In regard to the now iconic stainless steel utensils he employs in his work, Gupta explains: "All these things were part of the way I grew up.
The [utensils] are used in the rituals and ceremonies that were part of my childhood." Born in the village of Khagaul in the northern Indian state of Bihar, Gupta's early life was shaped by a humble, rural upbringing which revolved around the family hearth, fueled by cow dung and filled with squat stools and the ubiquitous steel cookware – all of which feature strongly in his installation work. The pop kitsch elements of Gupta's work are a nod to a culture of mass production, resonant of the multimedia work of pop artists Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, and yet, singularly Indian in character.

Used primarily for transporting hot lunches, tiffin boxes (from the archaic British slang tiffing, or snacking) are a colonial hangover from the days of the British Raj. Unable or unwilling to adjust to the local cuisine, a system evolved to deliver British civil servants home-cooked meals to their workplaces. Nowadays, tiffin culture continues to be widespread throughout India and particularly pronounced in Mumbai, India's largest city, where more than 200,000 tiffins are hand-delivered each day, at 12.45pm sharp, by a finely orchestrated horde of tiffinwallas or carriers. So efficient has this system become that Forbes Magazine has awarded the tiffinwallas of The Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers a 6 Sigma performance efficiency rating. Art critic S. Kalidas explains: "This is the 250 million-strong middle class India with a sharply rising purchasing surplus that the business magazines are all talking about, and this is the India that Subodh so dramatically first seeks to recover and represent – with all its chaotic contradictions and baffling complexities – in his persona and in his art; and then diametrically seeks to universalize this for the "other/contemporary" world ...

"By vividly unleashing these subliminally-absorbed concepts of capacity and containment in his reductionist art, Subodh Gupta nimbly seeks to stride the trapeze so tenuously stretched between the post-colonial/post-modern global and the naïve-kitsch Bihari local with the panache of a madman, a magician or a prophet."  (S. Kalidas, Subodh Gupta, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2008, p.84)