Avid Learning and Nature Morte, New Delhi proudly present an Exhibition Walkthrough with Leading Contemporary Artist, Subodh Gupta and Curator and Artistic Director of the Prada Foundation, Milan, Germano Celant through his new exhibition अनहद / Unstruck.

In his most recent works, Subodh Gupta explores the primary material for which he is known: metal in all its diversity. Included in the exhibition will be sculptures, installations, even paintings using metal. The works, monumental in scale and dramatically installed, draw on the artist’s background in theatre, and most are activated with light or sound. Gupta is interested in highlighting how one can find the universal in banal objects and witness the divine in the most humble of means. Join us for an exclusive walkthrough with the artist in conversation with Curator Germano Celant. Celant curated Gupta’s 2014 solo retrospective at the NGMA, Delhi and has described his work as having an “uncontrollable eruptive force” and an “avalanche-like” quality. Do not miss this significant event as the maestro artist returns to Mumbai after ten years.

Subodh Gupta was born in 1964 in Khagaul, Bihar, and studied at the College of Art, Patna (1983-1988), before moving to New Delhi, where he continues to live and work. Trained as a painter, Gupta is very uninhibited about the use of media (or scale.) Arranging traditional utensils, pots, and pans, Gupta approaches the readymade items with a Duchampian irony, while also offering social commentary, playing on the clichéd images of India’s rapidly changing society. In identifying Indian icons that possess innate dichotomies, such as a colonial-style ambassador’s car, sacred cow dung, or the stainless steel utensils of a typical South Asian kitchen, Gupta questions the ambivalence of a society caught between traditional customs and globalization, booming wealth and impoverishment, and old caste politics and religious beliefs.

Germano Celant is a renowned art historian and curator, internationally acknowledged for coining the name of movement Arte Povera. He has authored over 100 publications, including both books and catalogues, and has curated exhibitions in the prominent international museums and institutions worldwide. From 1989 to 2008, Celant was the Senior Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 1997 he served as Director of the Venice Biennale and he has been a contributing Editor to Artforum since 1977. Celant has been Director of the Fondazione Prada, Milan since 1995.