BOOK:Subodh Gupta, SKIRA Editore

The monograph “Subodh Gupta” by SKIRA Editore accompany the first Retrospective dedicated to Subodh Gupta in France, which took place at the Monnaie de Paris in April 2018. For this event, several of the artist’s most iconic artworks, such as “Doot”, “Very Hungry God” or “Faith Matters” were exhibited in order to retrace his entire career from the early days in the 1990s, to his latest experimentations with video and sound. Subodh Gupta employs many of the original techniques of Marcel Duchamp by elevating the ready-made into an art object. Gupta chooses signature objects of the Indian sub-continent and relocates them as art objects in monumental installations of stainless steel and tiffin-tins. From these ordinary items the artist produces works that reflect on universal issues including migration, globalisation, and the cosmos. Subodh Gupta’s work exemplifies the iconography of a banal, precarious, edgy and bustling everyday life, often monumental in magnitude, blown out of proportions, peeled out of their ordinary skins by their sheer mass and volume. With “Very Hungry God” (2006), Gupta seizes the spiritual dimension of food. The work takes the form of a skull that has been created with hundreds of gleaming stainless steel utensils, the kind used in the majority of lower and middle class families’ kitchens in India. The piece embodies the disturbing duality of alluring excess, on the one hand, opposed to crippling starvation on the other, which result directly from the capitalist modes of production. The artist showed this work for the first time during the 2006 edition of Nuit Blanche, in Saint-Bernard Church, famous for the struggles that had taken place ten years earlier when it was occupied by illegal immigrants. The church had then become a site of resistance and regular demonstrations against the expulsions ordered by the government.-Dimitris Lempesis