Subodh Gupta attained international fame with his large-scale installations of shiny stainless steel vessels and his sculptures consisting of countless worn-out dishes and other items of everyday use in India. The MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst is now staging the artist’s most extensive solo presentation in Europe to date with sculptures, paintings, videos and performative works from all phases of his career.
Gupta has moreover developed two large installations and a performative work especially for the show at the MMK. The survey builds on a retrospective presented last year at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
Subodh Gupta’s works mirror the current situation in India – a society shaped in good part by the major transformation processes brought about by the rapid economic upswing of the past decades. At the same time, daily life in India is still determined as strongly as ever by traditional values, spirituality and religious belief. Gupta explores these various developments with the aid of supposedly banal everyday objects. Yet the materials he uses for his works not only bear a relation to sociopolitical aspects but are also deeply linked to his personal biography.

A catalogue will be available in English, edited by Aveek Seen and Susanne Gaensheimer.
With contributions by Germano Celant, Bharti Kher, Sunil Khilnani, Raqs Media Collective and Aveek Seen, published by Penguin Books India.

Subodh Gupta -