Artists Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta turn to their studios and dedicate their practice to Covid relief operations across the country. By Uma Nair
Amid the ongoing crisis across India, artists Bharti Kher and Subodh Gupta turned to their studios and dedicated their practice to Covid relief operations across the country. They created nine signature works that extended their long-standing artistic explorations of found objects and rituals every day, while also speaking to the world of the moment. Through the initiative, Pledge, the artists hope to raise Rs 1 crore towards sustainable long-term aid and will donate 100 per cent sale proceeds to Hemkunt Foundation and Goonj in support of their relief efforts.
Kher’s Collages of bindis
Kher’s A Small World Together features a series of collages of bindis of different colours, shapes and sizes which are placed on existing world maps. With these detailed and storied maps, as a ground, and the bindis suggesting certain patterns of movement, the works speak to the intrinsic global connectivity of the ongoing crisis and broader humanity.
Among Kher’s signature materials, loaded with symbolism is the bindi. It first started appearing in her work in 1995 and she has since inherited its aesthetic and cultural duality. Her use of found objects is informed by her own position as an artist located between geographic and social milieus. Her way of working is exploratory: Surveying, looking, collecting and transforming, as she repositions the viewer’s relationship with the object and initiates a dialogue between metaphysical and material pursuits, using it to mix every day with the sublime.
Kher explained, “The bindi, to me, represents the third eye — one that forges a link between the real and the spiritual/conceptual/other worlds. Used as a material to articulate and animate her themes, it acts as a material, much like paint or clay, but with an inherent narrative linked to consciousness. It undergoes a shift in its initial cultural capital — it is defamiliarised, made to seem scientific, mystical and coded.”
Gupta’s everyday kitchen kitsch
Gupta has made everyday kitchen utensils, his leitmotif. He has created a dialogue between the functional and humble elements in our domestic lives, which have taken on even greater importance through lockdowns and the centralisation of home.
His stainless installation, A Bouquet of Flowers, in stainless steel, reinterprets the ordinarily short lifespan of flowers, while the paintings My Village I and II engage in the genre of rural still life. Gupta’s still lifes meld art history and socio-economic culture. These two oil on linen works are masterpieces in themselves. In a conversation, he shared that among still life artists in the world he likes Giorgio Morandi and Paul Cezanne, but his favourite work is by the 19th-century French realist painter Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter, made between 1875 and 1885. People see Mound of Butter, exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and immediately want to spread it on a chunk of hot bread and eat it. Oil paint and butter are nothing alike. But no painter in history has done a better job of making us imagine they could be the same substance.
Relief work by artists
“Watching the past few weeks unfold in India has been traumatic for every family. Almost all of us have been touched in one way or another by the unprecedented scale of the second Covid wave in India. So, as artists, we decided to help in the way that we could. We hope that we can raise Rs 1 crore towards sustainable long-term aid,” said Kher.
“Art can’t change the world on its own but it can make it a kinder and more human place to live in. Our works are both a witness to and a celebration of the value of the ordinary and everyday markers of human habit and daily ritual. In our small way, we just wanted to help in this huge humanitarian effort that brings us all closer together in the spirit of sharing,” said Gupta.
Kher and Gupta are not new to helping people during catastrophes and calamities. In 2008, they brought together 31 leading contemporary artists and helped raise Rs 3.93 crore through Artists Flood Relief Charity Auction in benefit of Samajik Shaikshanik Vikas Kendra (SSVK) and Goonj to back their efforts to support flood relief work in eastern India. The top lots sold at the charity auction included Subodh Gupta’s Untitled for Rs 1.73 crore and Bharti Kher’s This Way and Never Another Way for Rs 84.52 lakh.
(The sale began on June 1 on www.pledgebybhartiandsubodh.com.)
Photos: Kher and Gupta Studios