'Line of Control' for art lovers

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) unveiled ‘Line of Control,’ an iconic stainless steel installation by contemporary artiste Subodh Gupta. Set up for the first time in India the art-work measures 36 feet x 36 feet and weighs 26 tonnes which makes it one of the largest public art installations at any museum in the country.

Speaking on the occasion Kiran Nadar, Chairperson, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art said “KNMA wants to bring home the most compelling works of artists in its collection. We are pleased to bring to India an outstanding work by Subodh Gupta, one of India’s most prominent artists representing the Indian contemporary art scene today. She further added, “The ‘Line of Control’ is not merely unique and rare, but brings a whole set of new challenges for the museum in terms of its installing, maintenance and storage. Nevertheless, the impact that the work had on me when I first saw it has
stayed with me and I am happy that we are making it accessible for people to experience this.”

The cloud like sculpture represents the mushroom cloud from Hiroshima or Nagasaki on that catastrophic day in August 1945 when America tested its first atomic bomb. The cloud evokes distant images of a massive cloud of smoke that we have seen mostly on the Internet, television or magazines.

Speaking at the launch, Subodh Gupta said, “I am excited and honoured to have this work of mine acquired by the KNMA and their decision and action to install it to make it accessible to the Indian audience. Taking a cue from art critic S. Kalidas’s essay on the work, I would like to say that  ‘Line of Control’ stereotypically brings to mind geo-political conflict but I have used it here as a poetic metaphor, to transgress and subvert its known meaning and wittily present a cloud burst of another kind – of prosperity, peace and harmony.” Currently, KNMA, headed by Kiran who happens to be the wife of Shiv Nadar, founder chairman of HCL Technologies is hosting a major exhibition curated largely around the KNMA collection, bringing together artists across generations through deliberate juxtapositions of the historic and the contemporary.