Subodh Gupta - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    The Guild Gallery, Mumbai

  • Exhibited

    Mumbai, By The Guild at Jehangir Nicholson Gallery, Avatars of the Object, August 2006

  • Literature

    Adajania, Avatars of the Objectin Exhibition CatalogueThe Guild Gallery, Mumbai, August, 2006 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Subodh Gupta casts traditional elements of Indian culture in contemporary media and contexts, referencing daily life in his native city of Delhi. Contrasts between rural and urban life often surface in his works, and Gupta draws heavily from his own autobiography, growing up in the remote town of Bihar before moving to India’s capital, a teaming metropolis of over 13 million inhabitants. Possessing a knack for identifying objects that reveal inherent tensions between the traditional and modern, rich and devastatingly poor, and East and West, Gupta is able to imbue these common objects, through re-casting and re-contextualizing them, with poignant and inevitably clever relevance. In this work, Gupta recasts simple branches of bamboo as gleaming chrome wands and arranges them with a simplicity that is more suggestive of American 1970s Minimalism than the messy reality of Indian daily life. Bamboo, which is commonly used for building and to make furniture, becomes an object of mystique and reverence in this work, which is appropriately titled Magic Wands.

192

Magic Wands 5

2004-2005
21 chrome-plated aluminium wands.
147.3 x 5 x 5 cm. (58 x 2 x 2 in).

Estimate
£50,000 - 70,000 Ω

Sold for £102,500

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

28 Feb 2008, 7pm
London