“Invisible Reality” at Hauser & Wirth Somerset is a major solo exhibition of new and recent work by Indian artist Subodh Gupta, who is best known for incorporating found and functional everyday objects into his works – items relating to his home country such as pots and pans.Occupying all five spaces of Hauser & Wirth’s Somerset gallery in the English countryside town of Bruton, “Invisible Reality” brings together a wide variety of sculptures, installations, and paintings by Gupta, including a new body of work created over a six year period.According to Hauser & Wirth Somerset, the works in the exhibition reference “cosmic parallels through the “conscious repurposing of daily realities,” reflecting Gupta’s “engagement with the intimate patterns and rituals that define the everyday.”To find out more about the exhibition and the new body of work, BLOUIN ARTINFO got in touch with the artist and asked him a few questions.“Invisible Reality” is the title of your major solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. What is the significance of the title in the context of the major themes and concepts that you address with the works in the exhibition?The title, “Invisible Reality,” communicates how, through my works I am making connections between the individual and whole and how great meaning can be found in the everyday, how our mortal lives differ from the cosmos beyond.The exhibition takes its title from the centerpiece – a re-assembled traditional wood and terracotta house from Southern India. Could you explain the basis of this work and how it encapsulates the overall essence of the show and its key threads and lines of inquiry?“Invisible Reality” is a re-assembled traditional wood and terracotta house. Over-illuminated by a bright light, the front panel both casts off and retains a blinding brilliance, affording the structure the illusion of levitation and probing one to speculate on the impenetrable contents within. The phosphorescent spillover animates the house and permanently alters its fate as a residential site, challenging the veracity of the boundary separating the interior and the exterior while imbuing it with the import of a mysterious transcendental metaphor.The body of new and recent work in “Invisible Reality” was created over a six-year period. What links the works in the exhibition and how do they reflect the character, nature, and key preoccupations of your ongoing practice?Overall, the works in this exhibition demonstrate the gradual shift in my practice from extremely personal themes to totally universal themes. While many of the materials I am working with are the same, my early works had a sense of nostalgia about them and directly referenced my childhood and upbringing. However, as I myself shifted to a big city (Delhi) and began travelling around the world, my work started being about larger global issues. This more recent body of work begins to show how I have begun to find not just my own story, or stories of India, or even stories of the world within my materials, but stories of outer space and the entire universe within them. Although perhaps the most simple works, the two paintings within this show best embody this theme for me. By painting larger than life close-ups of these worn and scarred utensils, I slowly began to see them as planets, their marks, scratches, and discoloration as signs of their varied terrain. Similarly, all the works in this show deal with some element of the celestial and astronomical rising out of the mundane and every day.“Invisible Reality” introduces new aesthetics and processes in your practice, as evident in the “Pressed for Space” series (2015). What is the significance of these developments in your practice and what inspired and motivated them?I have been working with utensils as my primary material for almost 20 years, and yet I am constantly discovering something new and exciting about them; a new way to look at them, treat them, and arrange them. In fact, the more I play with the same utensils, the more they seem to surprise me. The “Pressed for Space” works show one of these totally new ways to work with utensils that I stumbled upon. It involves pressing a 3D object and creating a 2D experience from it. I feel like it is just the beginning of a new type of work for me. Symbolically, on the one hand, these works are a continuation of my exploration of found objects; the way in which one can trace stories of their past and the past of their many users. On the other hand, the compressed look creates a tension between intimacy and suffocation, one that people in both an overcrowded country like India and an over-connected world feel in different ways.The opening weekend will feature an Indian-themed takeover of the gallery’s on-site restaurant. Could you explain the inspiration behind the menu and how the restaurant intervention contributes to, and complements the exhibition?As my extensive work with utensils probably shows, I feel very much connected to the kitchen, and not just the utensils but also the food that we eat from them. I am very passionate about cooking, and more so about eating! I love food from all over the world, but I am constantly impressed and surprised by the variety of ingredients and preparations available in India itself. The regional differences in dishes are dramatic and I love to mix up cuisines from across the country. I’ve always loved cooking for family and friends, but until recently it was more of a personal hobby. However, I started cooking for small groups of people who came for my openings a few years ago (see images of lunch in studio with MMK 2014 and cooking in Performa in 2013) and slowly the groups became larger and now it’s involving the public, which is great. I see cooking gradually becoming like a performance that is integrating with my work. Because the work in this exhibition very directly interacts with the objects from which a majority of Indians eat, it seemed to make sense to also offer a taste of the food that fills those utensils to viewers.
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