Memory maps on metal

Artist Subodh Gupta's latest solo show is a spectacle meant to dazzle but the creations are also deeply personal and brimming with remembrances.

All battles are cosmic just as they are infinitesimal. And all battles are fought both within and without, the memories of which are sculpted, carved, burnt and etched into us. A profundity that renowned contemporary artist Subodh Gupta has illustrated with a gargantuan metal pot.

Gupta’s latest installation, which comes after a gap of five years during which he has had his fair share of ups and downs, seems like a work that intuitively encapsulates both the light and dark, yin and yang, in the artist’s own life as well as the viewer’s.

As you enter the gallery space, ‘Cosmic Battle’ takes up an entire room. Suspended from the ceiling in semi-darkness, a gigantic handi fashioned out of steel, brass, pigment and stone reflects you back at you. As you search for yourself in its shiny exteriors, little pieces of distorted you ricochet off its walls and into its cavernous depths at the centre of which is a stone, still yet moving, lifeless but alive. Hypnotic and overwhelming, intimidating even, ‘Cosmic Battle’ forces you to stop; to gather. As it rotates slowly, carefully, you fathom your insignificance in the vast scheme of things even as you become sharply aware of your own self.

Therein lies Gupta’s triumph as an artist — to be able to draw in his viewer to ponder and pause with the most unassuming of things — handis, batlas, thalis and katoris. “My art is from my memory — the way we ate our dinner sitting on a batla at home, a single light bulb suspended over our heads, the toota-phoota bartan we dug into, my mother cooking in a burnt-at-the-bottom handi...these made me what I am,” he says in his patent Hinglish, which he speaks even in the often snooty world of art with a confidence that arises out of extraordinary success. Growing up in Khagaul in Bihar, the only memory of art Subodh says he had was of kitschy calendars. “I used to copy from those calendars,” he chuckles. Despite protests from his family, most of whom were working in the Indian Railways, and ignoring all implorings to do ‘koi bhi naukri’ (any job) and paint only as a hobby, Subodh went on to study at the College of Art, Patna, and later moved to New Delhi.

Utensil aesthetic

For many years, he painted ‘bad art’, he says before he found the courage to do what his heart was telling him to — work with objects. He found his voice in the ubiquitous steel utensils of his childhood that spoke not only of the social and cultural milieu that he came from but also grew beyond their physicality to reference as well as challenge notions of immensity, intimacy and aesthetics. How does he zero in on a medium to work with? “When a concept or an idea strikes me, the medium suggests itself. It is a deeply internal process and cannot be defined. Every one of my works is about the universe out there as well as the world within me and it is hard for me to say what emerges from which layer of memory.”

Perhaps why the ancillary installation titled ‘Self Portrait 2022’ heaves with deliberate consideration. A heap of utensils piled high on the remains of railway tracks groans every time it ‘inhales’ and slumps down as it reluctantly exhales. “I grew up near railway tracks and my recollections are full of the sounds and textures of trains,” he says. The utensils have an air of disorder and abandonment about them. Was this a conscious act? He takes a while to reply. “I am about my mother. I cannot quantify her influence over me. When I was creating this work, I remembered how she used to perform havan and decorate the space by putting sand, rice and a single utensil...somewhere within that tumble of utensils is this strand of memory.”

Dialogue with the self

The third installation is again a work that feels intimate. ‘Torso’ is a torso but one that is succumbing to the powers of nature as it were; in this, the artist is exploring the shape and contours of his own body. Incidentally, it is self-cast in bronze and stands anchored to a plinth made of railway tracks from his hometown — the representation could not be more direct.

As he stands gazing at his own self so to speak, I am curious to know at which particular point does he feel a work is complete. “That’s a very difficult question. Sometimes, you love what you have created so much that you think...’arre thoda aur karte hain’ and then it gets spoilt. Experience and instinct...an artist has to learn to trust both.”

Taken together, these three installations seem to have crystallised every bit of this experience and instinct he speaks of; perhaps why there is such a palpable sense of both the self as well as the cosmic in them.