Best-known for his installations of stainless steel utensils, Subodh Gupta, who trained as a painter, also rendered the utensils on canvas. The present lot is one of Gupta’s nearly photorealist paintings of these steel bartans (utensils). This chrome assemblage floats unassisted in the air resembling astronauts training for zero gravity. With this work, Gupta is commenting on the shifting cultural context as one moves between East and... Best-known for his installations of stainless steel utensils, Subodh Gupta, who trained as a painter, also rendered the utensils on canvas. The present lot is one of Gupta’s nearly photorealist paintings of these steel bartans (utensils). This chrome assemblage floats unassisted in the air resembling astronauts training for zero gravity. With this work, Gupta is commenting on the shifting cultural context as one moves between East and West.

To the West, the shiny silver finish reminds one of a futuristic space age. In India, however, stainless steel is synonymous with the middle class. Art critic S Kalidas notes “the value endowed to these objects by the power of myth, legend, daily ritual and intimate usage. It is true that all these objects are widely used for cooking, serving or storing food in Indian kitchens. What is often overlooked is that in the Indian space these utensils have a secret, sacred life of their own. These objects – the baalti (bucket), the lotaa (squat pitcher), the kumbhaa, the kalasham or the gharaa (large pot-bellied pitcher), the pateela (pan), the thaali (plate) and the chimtaa (tongs) - are also signifiers of widespread cultural, mystical and religious practices in rural and urban middle class India even today.” (S Kalidas, “Of Capacities and Containment: Poetry and Politics in the Art of Subodh Gupta”, Subodh Gupta: Gandhi’s Three Monkeys, New York: Jack Shainman Gallery, 2008, p. 84)

Gupta belongs to the first generation to step into a world globalised without precedent and as an artist is very interested in the slippages of meaning between cultures. American artist and gallerist Peter Nagy elucidates the unique ways stainless steel enables Gupta’s proclivity to play with shifting meaning, “Steel is its own strange doppelganger. Polished it acts as a mirror, tarnished it is opaque. It can be both weapon (sword) and protector (shield), Resistance and Establishment. Piled into accumulations as Subodh treats it, it is coinage and currency, the glittering allure but also the solidity of capital in its most primal form… Seen as pure and one-dimensional, it is actually the most complex of alloyed metals. Used as a work of art, it communicates a seductive pleasure but also a bankable dependability. To transplant it from the corner of a mud hut in rural Bihar to the top floor of a glamorous art gallery in Bombay questions how any society constructs meaning and value out of anything.” (Peter Nagy, “Subodh Gupta: The Metaphorical Sublime”, Start.Stop, Mumbai: Bodhi Art, 2007)

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