Prodosh Das Gupta (b.1912)

Good overall condition. More blue-green to patina than in catalogue illustration.
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"A lean sparseness characterises Prodosh Das Gupta's sculptures, almost as though he wanted to reach the essence of human emotion while absolving the form from it. Nothing was more important, he would note, than life's breath breathed into a sculpture – what the Indians called prana, and which his role-model Henry Moore described as sculpture having its own life.

"In attempting to arrive at that ephemeral soul through the rigidity of bronze, Prodosh Das Gupta invented something he would label 'instant sculpture'. It wasn't so much sculpture made in a jiffy, as the term might suggest, as it was intuitively (as opposed to intellectually) created, shaped by hands and a mind that had not dwelt too long on the possibility of what might result from "directness, spontaneity, vitality and a microcosmic feeling" – according to the sculptor – that would give his work a "life force and meaning". Pared down from the excess of some of his predecessors and contemporaries, Prodosh Das Gupta nevertheless remained fettered to humanistic concerns, whether involving relationships or socio-political issues such as hunger. But in steering away from the maudlin or sentimental in favour of the steadiness and solidity of his choice of medium, he breathed into his sculptures a contemporary timelessness."

Kishore Singh