Works by Subodh Gupta and Rashid Rana at ‘BRIC 2011’

Two key artists whose works are included in the Phillips de Pury & Company's ‘BRIC 2011’ auction highlights are:

Subodh Gupta's 'There is always cinema (IV)', 2008 (£200,000-£300,000)

Subodh Gupta is best-known for his sculptures made from accumulations of everyday objects such as antiquated machinery and stainless steel cooking utensils. In this work, 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. Echoing equally in this clever, beautiful work are art historical references to the ready-made, to minimal art with its seriality, and to appropriation art.

Rashid Rana's 'Veil IV', 2007 (£250,000– £300,000)

His ‘Veil IV’ depicts five women, each anonymous, standing side-by-side in serial succession. The shapes of their bodies blur beneath the voluminous folds of fabric and facial expressions and sentiment are deliberately effaced by the veils. Each wears the chador, hijab and niqab; and while the colours may vary as do, barely perceptibly, the height of those underneath, there are otherwise no individual characteristics by which to identify the subjects of the photograph. The subjects of the photograph, though, are two fold, as anyone aware of Rana’s work will know.

On a macro level, five Muslim women, bodies fully obscured; on a micro level, hundreds of Western porn stars, limbs splayed for the camera, and anyone with access to the internet and a computer. Rana here exposes the hypocrisy of Western thought, whereby thousands of women are also suppressed and rendered faceless whilst wearing nothing at all: porn stars, the erotic oil of the billion-plus dollar adult industry machine.