SELECTED WORKS BY Probir Gupta
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Probir Gupta
Rats And Generals In A Zoological Park
2007
Acrylic and oxides on canvas
Overall size: 229 x 488 cm |
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Probir Gupta
Free Passage
2007
Acrylic and iron oxides on canvas
Overall size: 226 x 396 cm |
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Probir Gupta
Anxiety of the Unfamiliar
2006
Acrylic and iron oxides on canvas
268 x 398 cm |
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Probir Gupta
The Bene Israel Family
2006
Acrylic and iron oxides on canvas
229 x 396 cm |
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Probir Gupta
Anxiety of Unfamiliar I
2006
Acrylic and iron oxide on canvas
198 x 194 cm |
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Probir Gupta
Anti-Colonial Inputs
2006
Acrylic on canvas
212 x 244 cm |
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Probir Gupta
This Is Not A Pipe
2005
Acrylic and oxides on canvas with stretched vinyl
244 x 292 cm |
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ARTIST INFORMATION
ARTICLES
Illusion, resolution and rendition by GAYATRI SINHA
At Half Mast, (Nature Morte and Rabindra Bhawan till this Sunday) an exhibition of paintings and installation works by Probir Gupta packs the kind of visceral energy that has generally evaporated from the more ironic, flamboyant imagery that characterises contemporary Indian painting in particular, and art in general. In the language of mythology, Mayapuri is the world of illusion, the web of enticement that Kabir laments in his poetry. Mayapuri, the Delhi colony, serves as a potent metaphor for Gupta, who sources his scrap iron objects from its wasteland of abandoned military junk. He then uses these objects - as both physical material and evocations - to virtually create a body of mutilated forms that serves as a dominating foreground-background within his paintings. The galleries at Rabindra Bhavan are dominated by his large brooding paintings of roiling limbs and metal objects that look like the aftermath of a bomb blast. More importantly, Gupta seeks to locate responsibility in his exhibition, by implicating power structures that loom like icons within this space. In the powerful painting, The White Man's Paranoia, the artist's indictment is sharp and inescapable. An apparently enfeebled Christ's figure is pushed behind images that loom like cinematic presences, figures drawn from a medieval west Asian world perhaps, that witnesses the expansion of churches, the construction of iconographies, the columns and arches of power that mark a triumphal spread of institutionalised churches. Like elements of paraphrase, there are scenes from European churches, icons in small niches now rendered in violent sexual acts.
The figures in this painting in themselves suggest an epic, cinematic dimension. A fat cat merchant, priest or women, one rich and conspicuously androgynous, the others as rough hewn labour. Together they witness the power of the church and upper European cities, the march of industry, financial and sexual control. The evocations of Abu Ghraib and acts of violence in the name of God are powerfully told. The recipients of such controls appear in works like Blue Print and the Dislocated Spine. Here, the waste of the army dump at Mayapuri becomes apocryphal for any such dump where mutating bones and crushed metal float into view. It is as if the back alleys of military detritus have made their way into an art gallery to shock you with their excess. These are images of an unspeakable desolation, no part of the canvas is free from the roiling metallic forms that seem to second best as mock phalluses, lending the notion of toxicity and dominance a deep and invidious dimension.
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Source: hinduonnet.com
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