Subodh Gupta

Private Collection, Mumbai (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Jack Shainman Gallery, Subodh Gupta: Gandhi's Three Monkeys, 2008, p. 86, illustration of another example in colour
Exhibition Catalogue, London, PM Gallery and House; Walsall, The New Art Gallery; Aberystwyth, Arts Centre; Pot Luck: Food and Art, 2009-10, p.16, illustration of another example in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition.
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Colliding Indian and global signifiers, whilst referencing Pop, Surrealist, and even minimalist traditions, Subodh Gupta’s pioneering idiom has captivated a thoroughly international audience. At once analysing Indian culture and foreign perceptions of his homeland, “Gupta offers something fresh and poetic: a socio-cultural examination that translates the local into a global language” (Ida Panicelli, ‘Subodh Gupta’, Artforum, September 2011, p. 345). Steeped in Gupta’s incisive critique, and exhibiting his tantalising visual aesthetics, Cheap Rice, executed in 2006, is a shining articulation of this celebrated and important talent.  

Gupta’s clever and exceptionally compelling vernacular references the quotidian reality of millions of Indians, whilst also calling up - and into question - the exoticising constructions which Westerners have projected upon India for centuries. His artful navigation of contradictory associations allows them to co-exist within Cheap Rice, inviting a variety of images, expectations, and points of reference to contend within the beholder. In one respect, the present work evokes distinctly Indian understandings of food and spirituality. Gupta has said: "I am particularly fond of kitchens. When I was a child, I considered it a place of worship, a kind of temple. For me, it is a place full of spirituality" (the artist cited in: Jérôme Neutres, Ed., New Delhi New Wave, Bologna 2007, p. 52). Devotional Hindu gestures being intermingled with the process of cooking, the sacred and the profane meld in the vessels used to contain and transfer holy water and nourishment alike. The objects overflowing in Cheap Rice are lota, pot-bellied vessels used in kitchens and to carry river water from the sacred Ganges throughout India. Analysing Subodh Gupta’s work, S. Kalidas has noted that “the pot-bellied shape of the vessel is symbolic of the pregnant womb and thereby of the body of the Mother Goddess” (S. Kalidas, ‘Of Capacities and Containment: Poetry and politics in the art of Subodh Gupta’, Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Jack Shainman Gallery, Subodh Gupta: Ghandi’s Three Monkeys, 2008, p. 87).

Yet the title Cheap Rice, and the rickshaw bike of a type seen throughout Indian cities, reference a distinctly modern, post-independence context of economic growth and urban life. More than a traditional dietary staple, rice is grown so cheaply in India that it tops exports worldwide. Moreover, the clamouring street life of Delhi or Mumbai, replete with hordes of entrepreneurial young men driving rickshaws, selling or delivering food, has become stock imagery associated with India. As its population expands toward 1.3 billion and wealth grows apace, the superfluity of such scenes takes on a new meaning – one referenced aptly, and not without irony, in the profusion of gold-coloured containers engaged in unfettered multiplication across Cheap Rice. Whilst a colony, Benjamin Disraeli called India “the brightest jewel in the crown” for its acknowledged profusion of agricultural, mineral and human capital. In keeping with Orientalist paradigms, the opulence of the Maharajahs similarly delighted Western publics, for whom the exoticism of untold riches gathered by despotic rulers elicited a certain frisson of pleasure. While Gupta often employs stainless steel – a material Jeff Koons once referred to as “proletariat silver” – the brass pots in Cheap Rice suggest instead a ‘proletariat gold’ cannily undoing colonial perceptions of Indian riches by substituting a precious metal for a cheap imitation (Jeff Koons quoted in: Vilis R. Inde, Art in the Courtroom, Westport 1998, p. 6). 

Gupta has said: “making an artwork is like putting on a play… You need a cast, you need props, you need a set and you need to be able to put them all together” (the artist cited in: William Pyn, ‘Subodh Gupta: Finding New Reasons to Believe’, Art Asia Pacific, March & April, 2010, p.100). Cheap Rice is stunning testimony to Gupta’s complex and visually enticing theatre, replete with implied characters and settings, and calling forth a variety of sensorial associations harkening to the streets of India. Coalescing the artist’s dazzling materials and conceptual concerns into a single sculpture, Cheap Rice emblematises the very best of Gupta’s oeuvre.