Artist Profile :: Probir Gupta

21 January 2009

In partnership with Gallery Nature Morte, one of India’s premiere contemporary art spaces since 1997, Phillips de Pury & Company presents The Audience and the Eavesdropper: New Art from India & Pakistan, featuring 10 of the most influential and soughtafter artists working in India and Pakistan. The exhibition opens in London on 26 November 2008 and in New York on 28 January 2009.

Through 15 December 2008:
Phillips de Pury & Company
Howick Place London SW1P 1BB

From 28 January - 14 February 2009:
Phillips de Pury & Company
450 West 15 Street New York NY

Probir Gupta has had a lifelong dedication to human rights activism and community development and his work touches upon issues of war, religion, development, globalization and genocide. Gupta equates the visual language of scorched and deformed industrial debris with the profound and omnipresent truth of human suffering in the 21st Century. He sources his shrapnel from abandoned military waste and using this debris as his clay he models mutant and macabre bodies and landscapes from these parts. The resulting paintings, fascinatingly complex with unexpected shots of color, take on the characteristics of a bomb blast: chaotic, dismembered and often apocalyptic. Technically, he employs a thick, almost violent, use of impasto and brush strokes and his imagery weaves rough-hewn bits of machinery into human flesh. His brutalist style has elements of agit-prop as well as abstract impressionism and art brut. In Capitalist Symbols, a large muscular figure of a 1930s male athlete stands tall but dated next to a seething cloud of vicious creatures. The Western figure, in spite of his physical might and size, is polluted by the toxic environment he inhabits and is unaware of the dissolution of his surroundings. Gupta might be drawing parallels to the waning might of many Western superpowers, suggesting unilateral international agendas which have seen prominence in global foreign policy begin to become dismantled. In Assembled Identities, words and phrases like “Petroled,” “Marxist,” “abstract aftermath,” “Hallo” and “my pen is hungry” suggest various political schemes as they crowd around a series of mechanized figure-like forms.

Probir Gupta, Capitalist Symbols and Products, 2008

In Gandhi and the National Products, Gupta plays with the popular acronym GNP, placing a large and graffiti-ed statue of Gandhi before a cluster of photos and Indian shop signs. Commissioned by Gupta from professional Indian sign painters, each sign is made to look commonplace and appropriated but actually includes a coy and clever play on names and phrases, whether it be a religious association, a message with the inclusion of a fellow painter’s name or a twist on the name of a popular politician. The work reflects the crowded visual pastiche of life in India while at the same time addressing the changing political climate; the defaced monument of the father of the country standing for the decline of many of India’s more innovative and enlightened political ideas.

Probir Gupta lives and works in New Delhi, India. For sale enquiries and more information about the artist please contact Veronica Collins, vcollins@phillipsdepury.com