Proust Mapping, 2024-26. | Photo Credit: Akik Rahman/courtesy of Subodh Gupta and Nature Morte

Subodh Gupta’s largest-ever solo show in Mumbai, “एक मुट्ठी आसमान“ (A Fistful of Sky), opened on April 3 at the Art House, Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, for a six-week display (till May 17), far too short a run for an exhibition of its scale and ambition. Thoughtfully curated by the former director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Clare Lilley, who has placed a few emblematic older pieces alongside recent work, the exhibition spreads across all four levels of the gallery.

Gupta has been in the news thanks to two of his creations featuring at the Met Gala in New York City in early May. Isha Ambani carried a bronze-cast mango in a custom crochet bag and Ananya Birla wore a face mask made from Gupta’s signature stainless-steel kitchen utensils in keeping with the gala’s “Costume Art” theme. There were nods to two other Indian artists during the event: Karan Johar had versions of Raja Ravi Varma’s Damayanti and Kadambari embroidered onto a cape, while Ananya Birla wore a gown citing M.F. Husain’s canvas The Lady with the Sitar to the afterparty.

It is no accident that these particular artists were chosen as part of a prominent international showcase, for they are, in my view, the three primary mythologisers of the idea of India in the visual arts, which may have something to do with them also being the most commercially successful artists of their respective generations. Ravi Varma married the sentimentalism of Indian narrative with European academic realism to forge a pan-India identity at a time when such a thing barely existed; Husain provided an Indian inflection to high modernist painterly form while extolling the unity-in-diversity ideal at the heart of the newly independent Nehruvian nation; and Gupta has used installations and sculptures in unusual media to explore an era in which the memory of a simple life grounded in Gandhian principles rubs up against economies based on globalisation and consumerism driven in part by migrant labour. Rather than producing harsh appraisals of these circumstances as so many of his peers have done, Gupta takes a longer view that contains space for reverence—a fundamentally affirmative perspective more interested in the civilisational than the political, although it does incorporate an occasional critique of violence and greed.

The first piece we encounter in the Art House exhibition is School from 2008, a grid of 45 patlas (low wooden stools) cast in brass, in front of each of which is a stainless steel thali carrying five katoris (small bowls), also stainless steel. Food is a constantly recurring subject in Gupta’s practice, approached not just as nourishment but in relation to culture, ritual, and ideas of purity. School nostalgically evokes his childhood in Khagaul, Bihar, while presenting traditional custom, represented by the seating arrangement, adopting industrial modernity in the form of a 20th century invention, stainless steel.

A fantasy space

The second level is given over to a new large-scale installation which lends the show its title, one redolent of hopes and aspirations of those who have little to call their own. The emotiveness of Gupta’s work is usually reined in, but in A Fistful of Sky he lets it flow freely. The installation contains nine beds/display case frames covered with mosquito-mesh netting. Each holds a different material: common grass; natural rock; cowdung cakes; grinding stones; a section of sloping tiled roof; debris from a demolition; a tap dripping over old metal buckets; belongings tied together as if in preparation for departure; and five old CRT television sets playing snippets of video shot by the artist. The mesh functions as a time-filter enhancing the sense that one is looking at past lives and ways of living. At the same time, the debris and bundled-up possessions introduce contemporary exigencies: the tyranny of the bulldozer and the demonisation of vulnerable migrants.

The contrast could hardly be greater between the Fistful of Sky section and the third level, the largest room in Art House, where the lighting shifts from dim to brilliantly bright and the mood from melancholic to dreamy. Much of the space is occupied by a monumental installation titled Kingdom of Earth, in which a white moose and ostrich appear among replicas of the famous Doric columns of the Greek island of Delos, here recreated in cement and stainless steel. Bartans (utensils) and colourful ceramic mosaics make up the surface of some of the columns while others are shorn of ornament. These choices are not random.

Seen from a distance, the utensils mimic the worn, pockmarked look of many classical pillars, while the famous tiled mosaics of Delos probably contributed to Gupta’s incorporation of decorative ceramics. The staging brings to mind Ranbir Kaleka’s digital prints which often depict animals and birds wandering amidst Greco-Roman ruins, though Kaleka’s iridescent landscapes have a very different impact. Kingdom of Earth is among recent works that signify a major expansion of the Delhi-based artist’s practice in the course of which he has confidently appropriated forms and features from Europe and Africa. He has in the past referenced specific Western artists, but that was as typical postmodernist quotation, very different in spirit from Kingdom of Earth, which creates a fantasy space all its own.

A different angle

The fourth level is the smallest of the rooms, containing a window that overlooks the level below, offering a different angle of view of Kingdom of Earth. It contains three recent paintings and the moving sculpture Faith Matters dating from 2007, the latter consisting of a winding sushi conveyor belt that transports multi-tiered stainless steel tiffin carriers. The containers look like a cityscape of high-rises and their criss-crossing suggests the frantic toing and froing of city life as well as global commerce.

One of the large canvases in the final room is of a battered aluminium vessel while the other two depict wilting flowers from an ongoing series titled Inner Garden. The emotionalism of Gupta’s current phase is in evidence again here, at the end of the exhibition. He has famously made a number of stainless steel skulls, but never has mortality felt more personal in his work than in these paintings. The pairing of the energetic exuberance of Faith Matters with the stillness of Inner Garden makes for a satisfying conclusion to a rewarding show.

Girish Shahane is an independent writer and curator based in Mumbai.

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