Sculptor Ved Gupta’s little men wear wicked smiles and have sparkling eyes. Look again, and in the contours of their caricatured figures, you will find biting satire. After receiving accolades at the Asia Pacific Contemporary Art Fair in Shanghai, Gupta has brought his fibreglass figurines before Delhi’s complacent art public. “Arrested Moment” is also Gupta’s first solo show in the Capital.“The so-called bada aadmi is not a man of enormous size. He is the one with power, though, one that is attained at the cost of the ordinary, lower-class citizen,” says Gupta, 32. He would know — his own life has been an extraordinary journey of a labourer becoming one of India’s brightest talents. When he came to Delhi 13 years ago, it was not as an artist. He had arrived from Bihar with a shirt on his back and a rupee to his name.And he worked as a labourer till commercial artist Mathuram Verma hired him. “That was my first art education. I honed my skills while being deployed at various sites in Delhi,” smiles Gupta. Then he went to Baroda, discovered fibreglass and delighted in satire. His little men — politicians, corporate fat cats and multinational honchos — are cut to size. But they are lethal and keep bouncing back, as Gupta portrays them in Motion in Paralysis. In Love Chair, the businessman promises sweet nothings to the naked man sitting on the other side.There are bronze figurines, too, with distorted faces, accentuated by scaffolds, a reminder of his days as a labourer. “My visual language is meant to attack class structures,” he says. Take a look, he says. And you’ll keep looking.The show at the Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, is on till September 30 and then moves to Gallery Threshold, F-213 A, Lado Sarai.
