Subodh Gupta

© Photo credit：Tony Metaxas

© Photo credit：Tony Metaxas

In his sculptures, Subodh Gupta works on icons of Indian culture: the cow, galvanized iron cookware, the scooter for delivering milk, cow dung, the Ambassador, the famous small Indian car. The work of Subodh Gupta tries to understand how all these objects are symbolic of a culture built on both individual and collective identities and the body politic of the nation itself. In the initial work of Subodh Gupta, the vocabulary was similar to that of commemoration – with these strange concrete monuments that swarm the Indian campaign. It creates anti-monuments to both work and dematerialized items, goods exported and livelihoods of colonization, moments from the everyday work of the Indian people. This gigantic sign of Indian culture formed by the bunch of buckets recalls the everyday life of a civilization that is in spiritual equilibrium with the elements of nature and at the same time, is one of the leading industrialized countries, after China.

Subodh Gupta

Born in 1964 in Khagaul, India.
Lives and works in New Delhi, India.

Subodh Gupta is one of the most important representatives of the new Indian art scene that has emerged over the past decade. His work involves prominent images of Indian culture that are transcended in impressive art objects, thus referring to French conceptualist Marcel Duchamp by elevating the ready-made into an art object.

Recent Solo Shows:
2009: Gallery Hauser & Wirth, London, UK. 2008: Arario Beijing, Beijing, China; Still, steal, steel, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (U.S.A); There is always cinema, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy; Gandhi’s Three Monkeys, Jack Shainman gallery, New York. 2007: Idol Thief, Galerie In SITU Fabienne Leclerc, Paris, France; The Rusholme Project, Shisha, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; Start.Stop, Bodhi Art gallery, Bombay, India; Silk Route, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK.