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Lot 25

 

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Touching on issues of development, urbanization and identity, Subodh Gupta’s oeuvre draws on the artist’s own journey from a small town in Bihar to the hyper-urban satellite city of Gurgaon, to question the homogenizing effects of modernization. Loaded with symbolism, Gupta’s paintings and sculptural installations point out the many fractures and schisms that mark contemporary India as it negotiates a path between local and global, self and the... Touching on issues of development, urbanization and identity, Subodh Gupta’s oeuvre draws on the artist’s own journey from a small town in Bihar to the hyper-urban satellite city of Gurgaon, to question the homogenizing effects of modernization. Loaded with symbolism, Gupta’s paintings and sculptural installations point out the many fractures and schisms that mark contemporary India as it negotiates a path between local and global, self and the world.

In Gupta’s art, “…vessels and vehicles undergo transformation in materials or scale, or are massed together into abstract forms that are pleasurable and discomfiting, familiar and strange. What evokes familiarity and what evokes strangeness alters according to the viewer’s location” throwing into question the idea that economic development leads to global convergence (Kavita Singh, Where in the World, Devi Art Foundation exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2008-09, p. 7, 8).

In the present lot, a large canvas from his ‘Cow’ series of works, the artist portrays three doodhwalas or milk sellers in the shadowy, semi-photorealist technique that characterized his painting at the time. Pedaling their bicycles loaded with galvanized metal milk-cans up a concretized road, these figures are an intrinsic part of the unique urban lifestyle that emerged in India following the economic liberalization of the country in the early 1990s. A complex amalgam of the modern and the traditional, the rural and the urban, this way of life lies at the core of Gupta’s body of work, animating the dialogues it sparks about India and the world.

The doodhwala is an epitome of hard labour and punctuality, and is the first visitor at every household at the crack of dawn. Unfortunately, this personal practice of ‘giving’ milk each day as opposed to buying it in tetra-packs, is a fast disappearing one. Highlighting the bittersweet and multifaceted nature of globalization and its homogenizing tendencies, Gupta questions the value of using a single lens or model to analyze growth and development. Dan Cameron explains, “Whereas in the West we have long become long accustomed to a world in which milk is something bought at the store and carried home, India finds itself at the transitional point where milk is still delivered, but using a system in which the human capacity to bodily transport things approaches a tipping point where need causes transformation, with or without human intervention. Once the milk-delivery process evolves to the next step of mechanization, India might even find itself confronting other perils involved in over-industrializing the food chain…” (“Wordly Possessions”, Subodh Gupta, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2008, p. 271)

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