Subodh Gupta

Born in Bihar, one of the most important centers of Buddhist teaching, Gupta now lives in New Delhi. In a sense, the artist’s life, his move from the country to the city, is an allegory of modern India, where the rural dimension of the village is rapidly bending to the influence of cosmopolitan culture.
The artist’s monumental sculptures and installations, created by assembling hundreds of sparkling stainless-steel utensils, reflect the ‘short-circuit’ currently taking place between archaic and modern culture, between traditions and change.
On the one hand, the monograph, which has two main sections, examines the career of the artist through an exploration of his work, from his earliest works up to the present day, and, on the other, it focuses on the exhibition entitled “There is always cinema”, created by Subodh in the former cinema of San Gimignano, which resulted in a series of works presented by Galleria Continua.
The book concludes with criticisms by the famed French critic Nicolas Bourriaud and Italian Elio Grazioli, and an extensive photographic content, most of which is published here for the first time, with examples of the artist’s extraordinary creations, made using various everyday utensils and pots and pans.