Sculptural form has such great potential for expressing a spectrum from the minutiae of life to grand narratives, and yet very few artists today explore their creative self through sculpture. And there are fewer still that use this as a standalone art form, without thrusting sculptures into installations or happening video art or as
amplifications of their painted oeuvre. Either larger-than-life compositions that attempt to be overtly sensational or completely mundane installations and sculptures dominate the art scene today.
Ved Gupta’s show Everyone Says I Am Fine therefore comes as a refreshing change. The artist works within the ‘modernist’ framework to create small format works in bronze and fibre glass. He explores one’s daily encounters with the socio-economic and political realities in the everyday business of living without messing about with grand trajectories and grandiose symbolism.
The title piece Everyone says I am fine exposes the hypocrisy of life, where men (and surely women also though these are entirety absent from the show) of all hues put up a uniform front of order and uniformity to cover up both the anxieties, angst and chaos within their existence.
Headless Chickens is a composition of figures of men scurrying along, their heads replaced by various pieces of baggage/accessories such as a briefcase or a water-can, or a gunny bag depicting associations with blue and white collar workers. They seem
to be rushing aimlessly towards entropy, emptiness or vacuity.
The artist makes a more explicit statement on the political economy both at the micro and macro level through his work The discovery of altruism — a character from the corporate world wearing a suit and a tie applies a mighty push against a block of green material while a pot bellied individual in kurta pyjama, perhaps a politician, applies a counter force. In this and other bronze sculptures, Gupta uses green red and other patinas in consonance with the texture of the metal to give the sculptural form added character.
Instead of patinas, the artist uses colour in a very dramatic manner in his fibre glass constructs. There is nothing trite about the frogs, sofas and male figures that are moulded in black, red and white. In all his works, he has blanked out the features of the faces without making them expressionless.
The works seek to invert social and economic hierarchies and gaze beneath the wishfully ordered surface reality at the underlying tensions of lived reality.
— The writer is an art historian, curator and critic