Subodh Gupta Storma New York

Uma Nair

‘When I see utensils, it gives me a feeling I can’t describe. I get very excited,’ says Gupta, of his process. ‘The marks of the utensils just tell me so many stories and I feel them so completely’. Gupta’s use of found objects may give his works Duchampian and Surrealist undertones, but metaphors aside, they articulate the tensions and dichotomies of everyday Indian life. The exhibition title ‘Seven Billion Light Years’ made reference to the Earth’s current population of seven billion human beings – and its cosmic inverse, the unfathomable distance between our mortal lives and a mysterious cosmos. Gupta’s art asks what it would mean to address the world’s people; not as an anonymous mob but as individuals who each possesses a piece of infinity. A centerpiece of the show was a series of new paintings called Seven Billion Light Years, which returns to Gupta’s signature subject of basic kitchen utensils familiar to every Indian. Utilizing three-dimensional objects affixed to canvas with resin, these paintings continue his investigation into the sustaining and even transformational power of the everyday. In them, viewers can detect what anthropologist and writer Bhrigupati Singh describes as, ‘the patterns we create through our diurnal scrapings, the marks we leave night and day, through rise and fall, joy and borrowed the original objects for his earlier piece – portraits of his de facto collaborators in the soul-searching process of his art.