The 62-year-old artist, one of India’s most celebrated, is in a ruminative mood ahead of his big Mumbai show that starts from April 3. If Gupta perfected the art of disappearance from family photos, he also mastered the art of appearance at Patna’s College of Arts & Crafts. “There was a college, there were classrooms and a large dormitory; but no teachers.” His parents, he says, took comfort in the fact that he was at least attending a college, and steering away from street theatre that had begun consuming his time.

While looking at sepia-toned family pictures on his occasional visits to his ancestral home at Danapur, Bihar, Subodh Gupta says he is always amused by his consistent absence from them. As the youngest of six children, it was easy to slink away with no one noticing.

He gained the practice of art from a diligent fellow student and honed his skills from taking up assignments with ad agencies, publishers and doing wedding décor. But it was the nights spent at Patna railway station, not far from home, that he immersed himself in art—sketching sleeping passengers on the platform, the lone guard, a bored tea shop owner. “I didn’t go to art school to become an artist,” Gupta says. “I went because I wanted to do theatre—and I needed a way to survive.”

But trips to art fairs in Delhi opened his eyes to a larger artistic world, as did the encounters with masters such as F N Souza and M F Husain. But it was his own journey—through theatre, graphic design, and lived experience—that shaped his artistic language, expressed predominantly using kitchen utensils.

“You have to find your own language,” he insists. “Not copy someone else.”

Today, Subodh is often talked about in the context of the global readymade, similar to how contemporary international artists like Simone Leigh, Jeff Koons and Joana Vasconcelos who use ordinary mass-produced objects to create art.

While Gupta follows in the tradition of (Marcel) Duchamp’s readymade, his work is more materially dense – he uses his vessels and dung cakes to talk about sustenance, memory and the unspoken infrastructure of home. “He’s taking the language of global contemporary art and anchoring it in very specific Indian realities – the kitchen, the street, the village – and showing how those local stories are actually universal,” says the Mumbai show curator Clare Lilley who was also the long-time curator of Frieze Sculpture in London.

The exhibition, titled ‘A fistful of sky’, shows a mix of old and new works. But the highlight “depending on how people see it” is a large installation of a pillar—his largest work--that has been 10 years in the making.

The exhibition is structured across four floors, each with its own emotional and conceptual rhythm. The first floor will introduce visitors to a mix of early works and new pieces, as a prelude.

The show then expands both physically and philosophically – the second floor is devoted to installation, drawing from a central thematic idea tied to the exhibition’s title. On the third floor, the experience opens into the monumental pillar, while the fourth floor exhibits new canvases, creating a vertical continuity that mirrors the passage of time itself.

“It’s not just about objects,” he explains. “It’s about walking through life and feeling it.”

“‘A fistful of sky’ is a powerful anchoring exhibition, because Subodh takes something as universal as a bed to talk about very relevant and heavy themes like migration and shelter. In today’s world defined by movement and often displacement, beds – filled with everything from demolition rubble to spice-grinding stones and vintage TV sets – become a way to talk about the ‘unspoken infrastructure’ of our lives. It’s about how we carry our memories and our need for safety with us, no matter where we go. It’s geopolitics through a very intimate, human lens,” says Lilley.

Witness to time

The mammoth pillar titled ‘Kingdom of earth’ is inspired by ruins that the artist encountered through his travels across India and the West, and the imagined ruins of Greece. “I had not visited Greece yet when I started my work, but I had seen images. I imagined it and I have made my own version,” says Gupta. “Ruins inspire me; they are readymade sculptures. When you look at a ruin, you’re seeing the past. But at the same time, you’re imagining the future. You think—how advanced were they? And suddenly, the past feels like the future.”

Around this work, Gupta creates an atmosphere to evoke an antique land. A dinosaur bone—scaled up and cast in aluminium — recalls a time long before human existence. A moose, never seen by the artist in real life, appears as an almost mythical creature. An ostrich, cast in bronze but painted white, stands both real and unreal.

“These animals stand as witnesses – they have seen what we haven’t. They carry memory,” says Gupta.

The reinterpretations of ruins, made from stainless steel, cement, mosaic fragments, and ceramics – “broken Good Earth plates” -- carry the illusion of age while being distinctly contemporary.

The inner garden

Alongside these installations, a quieter body of work emerges: a series of three paintings titled ‘Inner garden’. At first glance, they appear to be floral compositions, but as Gupta says, “a flower is never just a flower”.

Drawing inspiration from the philosophy of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, the works present an arrangement of balance, rhythm and inner equilibrium. There is also a spiritual undercurrent: the act of offering flowers in Buddhist traditions, where arrangement becomes ritual. “It’s about your inner garden. How nature balances you,” he reflects. “What you see is who you are.”

Stupa of everyday

Another striking body of work in the exhibition is a series titled ‘Nine stupa’ -- sculptural forms inspired by Buddhist architecture, but made from used and discarded aluminium utensils. The artist got the idea during a visit to Ladakh where clusters of small stupas dot the landscape.

The utensils—collected from scrap markets, destined to be melted down and sold in blocks — carry traces of everyday life. “Meals eaten in anger or joy, families gathered, moments forgotten.”

“What makes ‘Nine stupa’ so special is how it bridges Subodh’s personal history with a much broader spiritual landscape. He’s drawing from two very different parts of his life: his roots in Bihar, which is the cradle of Buddhism, and his travels in Ladakh, where he was struck by the presence of these ancient, weathered stupas,” says Lilley. “When you stand in front of them, you realise these aren’t just an installation of sculptures, but they hold the traces of countless meals and years of domestic labour. By arranging them into this sacred, monumental architecture, he’s essentially saying that the most ordinary, repetitive acts of care are just as holy as any religious relic.”

Indeed, today, despite international recognition, his connection to Bihar remains deeply personal. “It’s my home. I love Bihar – despite its challenges, stagnant institutions, lack of infrastructure and missed potential,” he says. “Which is why growing up in Bihar toughens you – you grow a rare confidence to take on the world.”

(‘A fistful of sky’ will open at NMACC’s Art House on April 3, and will be on view for six weeks.)