Subodh Gupta focuses on instruments of measurement for his new series

A significant show at Hauser & Wirth (New York) incorporates recent works by Subodh Gupta, who now turns his attention to instruments of measurement - in particular, those related to the food & drink that all humans measure through either daily consumption or desperately thwarted hunger – as metaphors in a chimerical visual poem about global appetite.

His ideas have taken shape in a variety of different media, from film and video, to steel, bronze, marble, and paint, which he employs for both their aesthetic properties and as conceptual signifiers carrying a wealth of connotations. The world-renowned contemporary Indian artist explores the opposing tensions of desire and control.

A tailor’s measuring tape, shirt buttons and a sieve are blown up into large-scale steel sculptures, establishing the rules of a game in which distortion and tricks of medium ambush viewers’ expectations of value. Comprising a group of sculptures, optically incandescent paintings, and two slyly illusionist installations, the new work on view further extends Gupta’s ongoing investigation into the sustaining and even transformational power of everyday objects and activities.

In the trompe l’oeil installation work ‘Atta,’ a simple, found wooden table bears a mound of dough that appears to have been measured out and lovingly prepared, but abandoned in the midst of kneading. Daily bread is the staff of life, but Gupta’s dough is inedible: sprinkled and surrounded by real flour, it is a painstakingly painted bronze simulacrum.

The complement to ‘Atta’ is an installation work from which the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York takes its name. ‘A glass of water’ presents another wooden table topped only with a single metal drinking cup. Inside this cup but just barely contained by it, is fresh water that mysteriously remains in a constant and unyielding state of brimming.

Filled beyond capacity and threatening forever to spill at the slightest vibration, Gupta’s simple but precarious offering serves up a rich metaphor for the almost unbearable tension between luxury and depletion, accumulation and deprivation, acquisition and exhaustion that are the daily diet of exploding international culture.

‘A glass of water’ will remain on view until June 18.

(Information courtesy: Hauser & Wirth, New York)