What are contemporary artist Subodh Gupta’s plans for the future?

Subodh Gupta is looking for life on Mars.

So far consumed by the idea of containing things—building sculptures by appropriating steel tiffins, milk pails, suitcases, cupboards, boxes and bundles—the artist is now shifting his gaze beyond the confines of the domestic. And indeed, beyond this world.

We should have seen it coming. For Everything is Inside, his National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) show in 2014, Gupta had created an installation titled All in the Same Boat, a monumental fishing boar crammed with utensils, furniture and other living essentials. Propped at a 45-degree angle, it had 11 ceiling fans affixed to it, turned upside down to look like propellers. It was a fully loaded spaceship ready for takeoff.

Italian art historian Germano Celant, one of Gupta’s big-gest champions, has always pointed to the “uncontrollable eruptive force” of his art objects. Celant, who curated this mid-career retrospective at the NGMA, has remarked on the “avalanche-like” quality of his installations.

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At his studio in Gurgaon, Gupta walks me through the labyrinthine levels to show me his new works four large aluminum sheets, almost six feet by eight feet, printed upon and then layered with oil paint. They depict galactic skies with shimmering stars. There are cracks on the metal, like lightning bolts. His studio assistant, a savvy digital strategist from New York, turns on a switch to show them off to their full effect: the bolts light up in electric blue. But the eye veers to the heart of the paintings, where the kadhais and handis, now synonymous with Gupta, pose as planets. Looking closer, I see that their scratches and soot marks have been reimagined as topographical details. For Gupta, these signs of use are like “palm readings” that enable him to imagine the history of the object and the people it belonged to.

The 52-year-old is deep in preparation for a solo exhibition in Mumbai next month, a significant event considering his last exhibition in the city was 10 years ago. Apart from this suite of four paintings on metal, there will be a pair of gigantic brass pots joined together—like a UFO—which have yet to arrive from a foundry in South Korea.

As an artist, Gupta’s God complex has so far been restricted to the symbology of home. He has reveled in reassigning value to the established order of everyday objects. By casting atta in bronze and fashioning starbursts with cheap chapatti tongs, he has raised the material value of things we take for granted. In Twins (2010), he literally puts the common-place on a pedestal by placing two oversized tiffin carriers made with pristine white marble on a cement block.

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“I’m working towards the same ideas but there are changes. It’s like a love story. Not all love stories are the same, but at the end of the day it is love, no?” he says. His interest in juxtaposing his utensils with outer space first made an outing in 2015 with a New York exhibition. Titled Seven Billion Light Years, it featured a series of paintings of used utensils resembling astral bodies. Could this interest in positioning the common with the celestial be a new direction?

THE WAY HOME
Gupta has always been one to pave new roads, not just for himself but for fellow rovers.

Mumbai gallerist Shireen Gandhy became acquainted with Gupta and his work in the mid-’90s. At the time, she ran Gallery Chemould in a small room tucked above Jehangir Art Gallery. “He was energetic and ambitious, but his paintings were nothing special,” she recalls. Then in 1996, she came across his installation 29 Mornings at the Jehangir Art Gallery, which bowled her over. It comprised 29 patlas—the rudimentary wooden slabs used to sit on floors embedded with objects from Gupta’s childhood, articles of daily life: a torch, gamcha, coins, food, colour. Having grown up eating breakfast, lunch and dinner on a patla, he went back to every memory associated with them.

“People such as Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram were already doing conceptual art but this was revolutionary,” says Gandhy. Three years later, she hosted his debut solo, which was where his steel utensils first made an appearance. Particularly striking was a floor installation, The Way Home (1999) which involved steel plates and tumblers arranged in a circle around the sculpture of a cow. A gun was served with each plate. This, along with a self-portrait on a canvas smeared with cow dung and embedded with red sequence bulbs that read ‘Bihari’ made two strong comments: Bihar was a rogue state, and this Bihari was here to stay.

“I was mulling over how I would price such unconventional works. I thought Rs 2 lakh. Subodh insisted on Rs 20 lakh. I told him no one would buy it. And I was right—no one did—but his confidence made a big impression on me,” she says, adding, “Everything that happened at that show was one-off. Subodh took the leap and we leaped with him.”

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In 2008, Gupta was the first to break the US$1 million barrier for Contemporary Indian art when his untitled installation of steel pots sold for a record US$1.2 million at a Christie’s auction. Sales records pegged him the subcontinental Damien Hirst. He had already been championed by European curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud (co-founder of the edgy Palais de Tokyo in Paris) and collectors such as François Pinault, the man responsible for planting Gupta’s Very Hungry God (2006)—a large human skull composed of shiny steel utensils—outside the Palazzo Grassi on Venice’s Grand Canal. But through decades of international preeminence—collaborating as scenographer for a ballet staged at Moscow’s prestigious Bolshoi Theatre, commissions from brands such as Chanel and Absolut—his artistic nutrition always came from home.

This reminds me of MF Husain, who, when asked to exhibit alongside Pablo Picasso at the 1971 Sao Paolo Art Biennale, after months of rumination and anxiety, had pulled off something Picasso would never step on with as much ease: Indian mythology. “He had a thunderbolt moment of using the Mahabharata as his starting point and did a series of works which subsequently became a theme he revisited for the rest of his life. It was a strategic move,” points out Yamini Mehta, Sotheby’s international head of South Asian art.

In Everything Is Inside, the monograph published by Penguin India in 2014 to coincide with the NGMA show, there’s a black-and-white picture of a young Gupta sitting on the stairs of the College of Art in Patna. Propping his face in his hands, his satchel resting by his side, he looks forlorn, but the angles of his body are charged with purpose. A quote on the facing page reads: “There are times when there is nothing else but what is around, which goes a long way in making you exactly as you are.”

“When making something new, I have always looked at my home, I have always looked at myself,” Gupta tells me. “Stephen Hawking says when you’re looking for other planets, the answer is here on Earth.”

What is Gupta looking for with his new series of paintings? “Life on Mars,” he jokes, pointing to the one hanging in his private office where he prefers to paint because of the relative quiet. The sound of the machines buzzing outside is a constant reminder of all the work in progress. A two story high steel bucket with utensils spilling out is being finished off to ship to a private collector in Bengaluru.

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I ask if he’s thought about how a psychoanalyst might say his obsession with containers suggests he is desperately holding on to an essence; creating safe havens for his child-hood memories from small-town Bihar, tying up pieces of his world in parcels so that it is not scattered or lost. Even his seminal 1997 work My Mother and Me had cowpats piled 10 feet high to create a round, sound-proof womb. “It’s not subconscious. I know what I’m doing,” Gupta asserts. “What you grow with, you carry with you. I’m gathering my own things… and because I know them already, I can dig deeper. It’s done with a lot of purpose.”

When I’d interviewed him in 2011, I remember a much angrier man. This was after the Christie’s record, and with great success comes great criticism the charge of him over doing the steel utensils and “flogging a theme” was rampant. “Think about any artist whose work you remember. You remember them because they created a bold style and believed in it completely,” Gupta had said. “It took me years to find my ‘formula’. Why should I abandon it?”

He is more tempered now. “It is not my business to explain what I do or how I think. Every artist creates his own language. Like you need to know if you’re vegan or vegetarian or a meat eater before you cook. I need to speak in my own language.”

The daily news, especially migration, displacement and violence against women, impacts him, but Gupta has learnt to look at what suits him best. “Art could be anything, but you have to focus on what you do,” he says.

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READYMADE WORLD
Gupta frequently laments his lack of a solid education. After a BFA in painting from the College of Art in Patna, where both teachers and materials were rare, he tried his hand at whatever he came across. Practising in Delhi, he missed out on Mumbai’s more vibrant artist community—the Sir JJ School of Art alumni with Atul Dodiya, Sudarshan Shetty, Jitish Kallat and many others. He claims no real mentor. Although married to fellow artist Bharti Kher, they’ve never collaborated, except once—“The Highway project in Australia very early on. We had so many ego clashes we decided never to do it again!” he says.

But for all his assertions on being unschooled and first-hand, his career, like Husain’s, betrays shrewd, strategic moves. He wears his erudition lightly. A throwaway comment I later realise is a Kabir doha. A recent work derives its title from a line in Rumi’s The Sufi Path of Love. When I ask if Gober Ganesha (2004), an aluminum basket of cow dung cakes cast in brass, is a reference to the artist Robert Gober, he denies it. “Even Peter (Nagy, his gallerist at Nature Morte) asked me that. But I never thought that way; it’s just named after the cow dung cakes my mother used,” he says, adding, “My English is not very strong so my titles are simple.” His titles, however, are some of the most evocative in the Indian art scene, involving both poetry and wordplay.

“Right now, I’m an abstract artist. I work with very figurative objects, but my works are abstract in thought,” he says. The staging, the reveal, the emotional manipulation, the titling, all appear carefully calibrated though. He agrees. Before art school, he did theatre for five years, doing one-act plays and street theatre. “Performing has become a part of my life. So whenever you see my large works, it is part of my performance on a big stage.”

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A better global counterpart to Gupta than Hirst is Jeff Koons, whose success comes from his skill at positioning himself as heir to Andy Warhol. Koons played off all of Warhol’s tropes like kitsch, commercial packaging and display, and was open about having studio assistants do his work. In fact, Gupta, who has a wicked sense of humour, masterfully pulled off a Koons on Koons when he created Jeff the Koons (2009), an installation of dozens of cast aluminium boxes, labelled as if they each contained Jeff Koons’s famed Puppy.

Gupta has systematically explored almost every major movement in Western art history, from Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades to the action paintings of Jackson Pollock and Paul McCarthy where they used their own bodies as a paint-brush (Gupta’s 2009 Master Bet is essentially water colour prints of his penis on handmade paper), and adapted it into his own artistic lexicon. And he has been transparent, even showboating, about these appropriations. This is not a Fountain (2013), for instance, is an obvious homage to Fountain (1917)—the readymade porcelain urinal Duchamp provocatively exhibited as a sculpture. Gupta’s installation is a cluster of found aluminum utensils with suspended water pipes—its title at once paying homage to Duchamp, but also René Magritte. Gupta has explored the Surrealists’ use of the found object, while his nudity and action artworks are a throwback to the Viennese Actionists of the 1960s.

He is a one-man art school, distilling 100 years of Western art history across two continents and hundreds of practitioners into one curriculum. Subodh Gupta is boldly going where many men have gone before. But Contemporary art is ultimately about perception. You could call him a copycat. Or a genius.

Nature Morte will open Subodh Gupta’s solo exhibition at Famous Studios, Mumbai, on December 9. Naturemorte.com

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