Subodh Gupta

Subodh Gupta was born in Khagaul, a small town in Bihar, in 1964, and studied at the College of Arts and Crafts in Patna from 1983 to 1988. He trained as a painter. The turn came when he brought the kitchen into the gallery.

The early pieces were rougher and closer to home. My Mother and Me (1997) was built of cow dung. In Bihari (1999) he set the word “Bihari”, often used as a slur, in lights beside a self-portrait in cow dung. Then came the steel: tiffin carriers, pots, pans and plates, stacked into towers and cascades. Everyone in India owns these things. Gupta made them glitter.

Very Hungry God (2006), a skull of kitchen vessels weighing over a tonne, was bought by François Pinault and placed outside Palazzo Grassi during the 2007 Venice Biennale. Line of Control (2008), a mushroom cloud of pots and pans, went to the Tate Triennial in 2009 and now stands at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. For the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012 he filled a 70-foot boat with chairs, beds, fishing nets and window frames, and took the title from Rumi. His stainless steel Banyan Tree (2014) is on permanent view at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.

He has shown at the Gwangju Biennale, Frieze and Art Basel, and in 2018 the Monnaie de Paris gave him his first retrospective, Adda / Rendez-vous.