Subodh Gupta : ‘Seven Billion Light Years’ at Hauser & Wirth, in NYC

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present Seven Billion Light Years, an exhibition of sculptures, installations, film, and new paintings by Subodh Gupta. Spanning the New Delhi-based artist’s career to the present day, the exhibition emphasizes Gupta’s distinctive use of commonplace objects in his ongoing campaign to map the effects of cultural dislocation in our era of shifting powers. In particular, Gupta captures the everyday realities of life in India – its nearly surreal collisions between the inescapably earthy and the ineffably divine, between the current of masses and the path of private days – through works of art that address dichotomies between traditional values and the impact of globalization.

Imperial Metal – 2014 – 24k gold plated TMT rods, burnt wood, steel (96.5 x 50.8 x 487.7 cm / 38 x 20 x 192 in) – Photo: Genevieve Hanson

The exhibition title Seven Billion Light Years makes reference to the earth’s current population of seven billion human beings – and its cosmic inverse, the unfathomable distance between our mortal lives and a mysterious cosmos. Gupta’s art asks what it would mean to address the world’s people not as an anonymous mob but as individuals who each possesses a piece of infinity. His approach is both artistic and anthropological.

My Family Portrait -2013 – Dimensions variable – Photo: Axel Schneider 

Cooking and eating are one of themes proposed by Gupta. That is the reason why My Family Portrait displays kitchen utensils on common racks that one might find in a middle class Indian home. The utensils here, however, are mixed with new stainless steel objects and old pots and pans. For all its works he always used different materials – such as steel utensils, cow dung and mud, these luxurious metals as copper, bronze and gold – and all of these are cultural elements and important for the artist. For example, in this exhibition, bronze serves as a rich metaphor for the almost unbearable tension between luxury and depletion, accumulation and deprivation.

Orange Thing – 2014 – Steel, copper tongs, plastic (233.7 x 228.6 x 61 cm / 92 x 90 x 24 in) – Photo: Genevieve Hanson

The exhibition – 511 West 18th Street in NYC – runs until 25 April, 2015.