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20/11/2008

Probir Gupta

Alexia Goethe Gallery, London

At this critical moment in our history when invisible forces of power are devising newer and more menacing forms of social repression than ever before, the artist Probir Gupta stands out as an independent voice, willing to grapple with authoritarian forces that pose a threat to our individual freedoms. Presenting a critique of organized state violence in the name of progress has been a recurrent theme in Gupta’s work for several years and this recent body of work in the form of installations and paintings, pushes this concern to the forefront.

Gupta belongs to the city of Kolkata where he grew up during a restless period of political and social turmoil initiated by the Maoist Naxalite movement. During its peak in the early1970’s, the movement promoted the cause of agrarian revolution through urban terrorism, deeply affecting the life of young men like Probir Gupta who was to soon enter the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata as a student of painting. While the violence of the revolutionary movement held no appeal for Gupta, the problem of social inequities, highlighted by the political ideology of the time, became a burning concern for him. Gupta then began to explore the possibilities of the visual medium of painting as a way of responding to this civil strife.

Probir Gupta has had an eclectic visual education for he has also studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris and lived in the French capital for several years as a migrant worker before moving to New Delhi in the late 1980’s. Experiencing the life of an outsider in Paris, he for a while, withdrew into a remote, self referential world of abstract painting in order to disengage himself from his immediate environment. This was quite in keeping with the last remnants of French Tachisme that had by then been canonized by the academy as the French equivalent of Abstract Expressionism. His return to politically charged content began when he involved himself with various community organizations in New Delhi from the early 1990’s, in order to extend his life as an artist into that of an art activist.

Since then he has produced a series of deeply moving works, usually executed on a very large scale; in a way aspiring to be a history painter of our times. Yet his paintings are not laconic records of events using an objective eye. As an activist, he has worked with social workers and educational institutions seeking a dynamic participatory engagement with the issues he takes up. The body of work created for this exhibition responds to the situations he finds himself in on a daily basis as the forces of “progress” in India have been rather uneven in their dispensation of the benefits of economic growth of the country. Through his work, he questions the structural strength of our democracy as it quivers and looses balance in response to the invisible voice of a controlling master who decides what is right and what is wrong for the world at large.

Agitated sweeping brushwork and thick impasto of paint is combined with found material exhumed from bulldozed built structures, once inhabited by migrant workers. Medical waste in the form of discarded plaster casts of broken limbs and photographs of obscure victims excavated from demolished homes, are all brought together in his installations as markers of a social index. The ability of each of these to evoke distinct meaning is made even more potent through their pedestalization and recontextualiziation as art, enabling us to link ourselves to the world of the dispossessed.

Text by Shukla Sawant, 2008.

Private View 21st November 2008

Alexia Goethe Gallery
7 Dover Street - London
Free admission

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