Subodh Gupta - BRIC London Thursday, April 14, 2011 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galleria Continua Srl, San Gimignano

  • Catalogue Essay

    Subodh Gupta is best-known for sculptures made from accumulations of everyday objects such as antiquated machinery and stainless steel cooking utensils. In this work, There is Always Cinema (lV) from 2008, an old door found by the artist has been cast in brass and then placed beside the original, suggesting that even the most banal detritus can reveal an exotic or precious concealed identity. Raised in the rural area of Bihar, the artist calls on his own life experience to express the harsh contrasts typical of a country in which the simplicity of rural culture and increasing urban globalization exist side by side. By translating these experiences into art, he confronts the viewer with formal simplicity laced with a complex web of references. The wooden door is a found object from a room which was first a cinema and then a gallery. Playing with this relationship, Gupta takes the no longer needed door and places it in the gallery itself. Beside it, he placed its brass cast, further ensuring the preservation of the discarded object through its metallic monument. With such an act, past, present and future come together in physical continuity and temporal transcendence. Through the transformation of the door, Gupta raises question on how to maintain the past in a society that surges forward. Echoing equally in this clever, beautiful work are art historical references to the ready-made, to minimal art with its seriality, and to appropriation art.

19

There Is Always Cinema (IV)

2008
Found wooden door and cast brass.
Wooden door: 178 x 71 x 10 cm (70 x 28 x 4 in); Brass door: 177 x 70 x 10 cm (69 3/4 x 27 1/2 x 4 in).
This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Estimate
£200,000 - 300,000 

BRIC

14 - 15 April 2011
London