The installations are assembled using what one knows as mundane objects that make up a middle class Indian lifestyle, yet Subodh Gupta's constructions with them have conjured up a global appeal.
Gallerist Renu Modi of Gallery Espace recalls coming across the artist and holding his first solo show in 1993 where "there was immense energy in the paintings he did then", referring to a particular series of paintings on the Indian bandwallahs.
Ever since then, Gupta, while experimenting with a host of mediums - paintings, sculptures, photography, video, performance, and now mostly installations - has "crossed those boundaries between a painter and a sculptor", says Modi.
Born in 1964 in Khagaul, Bihar, Gupta went on to study fine arts at the Patna Art College. Even as Gupta traversed the distance from his rural origins to the city lights of Delhi, his artwork always depicted the stark realities of the huge suburbia called the middle class that dominates urban India.
The ordinariness of steel kitchen utensils, cow dung, milk buckets, cycles and scooters found their way into his art - unnoticeable everyday items elevated to the status of works of art.
Like an installation titled "This side is the other side" done in 2002 where Gupta adorned a bronzed scooter with chrome-plated milk cans - the important yet indistinct doodh-wallah or milkman's milk delivery ritual transformed into not-so-ordinary aesthetic expression. Gupta, all the while seemingly associated yet detached from it all.
In a way Gupta also documents the shifting status of India's middle class, porous enough to let seep in the effects of globalisation's societal changes, even as it retains its essence, morality and culture in other ways.
Gupta's artworks make him a locally sensitised artist where a global audience gets a peep in to many aspects of Indian middle class lives, making him a global artist and citizen.
Renu Modi feels that "Gupta has taken Indian art internationally, which is now curated internationally too."
Gupta has always been inclined to large spaces, whether for his canvas or installations, and maintains a sense of drama and theatrics - a basket of bronze dried cowdung patties.
Or at times more than life-size scales, such as a stainless steel milk pail that is six feet tall, but again all sentimentally Indian, yet with an unconventional twist.
He is now considered an important artist not only on the Indian scene but also internationally as his exhibitions globetrot across continents.
Says a spokesperson from Bodhi Art Gallery that represents Gupta's work, "It is not surprising that Gupta's artworks are fetching the prices ($185,806 for 'Idol Thief' at Christie's last month) they do today as the quality of his work is indeed very, very good. Over the past few years, Gupta has attracted a good deal of international attention and not just at auctions, but also by being included in a number of prestigious shows such as the Venice Biennale last year."
According to Bodhi Art, Gupta's works attract a response from all over the world, and that "many of the high prices being fetched by his works at auctions are because he is being bought by international buyers".
Hold that thought as collectors around the globe hold on to a slice of quintessential Indian middle class lives.
