Subodh Gupta on memory, migration and metal: Inside ‘a fistful of sky’ at NMACC

Years later, the utensils continue to remain central to his practice, as is visible at one of his most ambitious exhibitions in India till date, A Fistful of Sky, at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in Mumbai. Unfolding across four floors, the show comes little more than a year after his homecoming retrospective A Way Home at Bihar Museum in Patna. Reflecting on the consecutive exhibitions, he says, “The Bihar show primarily featured older works, whereas this showcase has me contemplating the past. In the process of this introspection, I feel I am expressing myself in ways that I would have during the initial years of my career as an artist.”

Proust Mapping by Subodh Gupta (Nature Morte)

At the very onset, the personal meets the communal. In the installation School (2008) stainless-steel thalis and low stools are arranged on the floor, reminiscent of several such arrangements across India, including how Gupta had his meals during festivities while growing up in Khagaul, Bihar. “Food is central to every festivity. I have fond childhood memories of how when people sat down to eat, they began together and no one left until everyone had finished their meals. It’s a gharana of sorts, like in music, which is why I refer to it as school,” says Gupta, 62.

The design of the brass stools, at the exhibition, is also personal. It comes from a stool that he used as a child and was found among other belongings during a renovation. The intimate associations continue in other works. If in Proust Mapping (2024-26) Gupta transforms flattened pans into cosmic surfaces, in Stupa (2024-26), he reimagines the Buddhist structures with assemblages of utensils gathered from anonymous households. “To me, Buddhism is not a religion, it is knowledge, and I truly believe in its principles. During a visit to Ladakh over a decade ago, I saw the entire landscape covered with stupas and that image stayed with me. I knew I wanted to work with it and for this exhibition, I decided to create stupas using reclaimed utensils, which themselves carry memories of those to whom they once belonged,” says Gupta. He reveals that a storage has his immense sculpture of the Bamiyan Buddha that is yet to be exhibited in India.

The Mumbai exhibition might be one of his most expansive presentations in India but it would be rather myopic to read his work through scale alone. Famously becoming the first contemporary Indian artist to cross the $1 million mark with a 2008 sale, his utensils-skull Very Hungry God had drawn attention at the Venice Biennale in 2006. The 26-tonne installation Line of Control (2008) replicated the mushroom cloud that forms during a nuclear devastation, while the seminal 2013 series Saat Samundar Paar focused on migration and global movement. Reflecting on themes of rootedness, growth and 20th-century Dada movement, his banyan tree installation Dada (2007), outside the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, borrows its title from the Hindi word for grandfather.

Stupa by Subodh Gupta (Nature Morte)

The beginnings weren’t as monumental. Growing up in a railway colony in Khagaul, Gupta recalls painting his first canvas as a teenager when he copied a portrait from the Hindi magazine Dharmyug. “I was a railway boy whose father and brothers worked for the railways. I really don’t know how I decided to become an artist but I simply loved drawing as a child,” he states. Though he would also often copy calendar art, it was theatre that had his allegiance. He remembers seeking admission into College of Art in Patna for the freedom it would afford him to pursue theatre. Actively involved in local theatre groups, including street theatre, he acted as well as worked on set design, posters and props. “My family was sceptical about a career in theatre. Art college still felt more acceptable to them. So I joined partly to reassure them, thinking I could continue practising theatre but after some time, I began to enjoy art and eventually fell in love with painting,” he says. Reflecting on that journey, he reckons how his art now has come to assume a distinctly theatrical and immersive quality.

The titular work in the ongoing exhibition stands testament. Nine beds are arranged across a large hall, each holding something symbolic and intimate, enclosed within a mosquito net. Among others are cow dung cakes, flickering television sets, belongings of migrant travellers and terracotta roofs that evoke fragile shelters. The title itself draws from the 1973 Kishore Kumar song, Har koi chahta hai, ek mutthi aasman. “Isn’t that something all of us desire?” Gupta asks.