Creativity is considered second to human nature. But creativity when related to an artist demands certain criterions. Foremost is the skill in rendering the world or the reality around truthfully as a photograph accomplishes. This quality or talent makes an artist. Within modern and contemporary milieu though, the artists may not have to represent the visible world accurately, but take images and objects from the environment to communicate metaphorically their ideas, which then becomes their signature style or expression.

An artist with a difference

One artist within the contemporary Indian milieu who has struck a posture of difference is the Bihar born, but New Delhi settled Subodh Gupta. The works of Subodh are viewed skeptically and critically as those of a maverick artist who is out to grab eyeballs. As a matter of fact, he is one of India’s most prolific artists working in a wide range of mediums from sculpture and painting to installation, photography, video and performance.

In his works he chooses to use objects that primarily have a utilitarian and not an artistic value. The aesthetics of Subodh are foregrounded in the inherent meaning that his objects can convey. That is the artist uses the products of rural India such as cow dung, milk buckets, or kitchen utensils, scooters, ambassador cars as grist for his artistic mill. By articulating his expression through them he is using it as a metaphor to make a statement about something. Hence the cow dung, milk pails, is reflective of his roots or his origins, which is the state of Bihar. Through these stereotypical and clichéd objects, Subodh is conveying the effects of migration, a sense of home and place and the frictions caused by it when uprooted. He nevertheless makes a powerful statement that has deep psychological implications carrying within it his emotions, feelings and sentiments. Also a sense of alienation is reflected. These are the anxieties of globalised living. In his use of materials, one observes a transition from organic such as the cow dung to manufactured objects like Ambassador cars, thereby tracing his own migration to the mainstream art culture within urban India.

What gives Subodh Gupta an edge

The question that confronts a lay man or even many connoisseurs and critics is ‘Why are Subodh Gupta’s works so popular’? His popularity and international renown stem from his creative visual thinking, which gives him an edge over others. The kitchen utensils and cow dung remains a ubiquity within India. There is nothing extraordinary in these objects. But it was Subodh who creatively interfaced with it offering a different notion of conveying the meaning of these objects. Through these objects he is stating his problematic identity, his assimilation within urban culture as well of home and place. His installations are remarkable and on a huge scale clustering together the same object as the milk pails in a hilly mound or recreating the ambience of the kitchen in the gallery space with racks and the attendant objects which it carries. He has extended his knowledge to those objects that had marked India’s character; as the scooter and the Ambassador car which in the 1970s and 80s were solely manufactured for the Indian public.

Important works of Subodh Gupta

Beginning in The Way Home, a solo exhibition at Gallery Chemould in Bombay in 1999, Subodh Gupta has journeyed successfully and untiringly having created many works as Pure (1999), first experiment with video art, This Side is the Other Side (2002) and an aluminum airport conveyor belt in Across Seven Seas (2006). For an installation in Paris' Eglise Saint-Bernard in 2006, he crafted A Very Hungry God a spectacular, monumental skull balanced from steel objects. In his installation Silk Route [2007] at Baltic in U.K; he created an impressive display of stacked stainless-steel cooking vessels and tiffin-boxes circulate continuously on an industrial-size sushi belt, evoking the fast pace and mechanized life in a metro as well the mass consumption of popular culture.

The acceptance of his ideas by the critics and connoisseurs nationally and internationally and his methodology of representation clearly clarify Subodh’s stance of having transited from the local to become global.

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