Probir Gupta
(b.1960, Kolkata)

Probir Gupta’s work has always carried a distinctly political and activist slant. Often combining art practice with community and development work, Gupta graduated from the Government College of Art and Crafts, Kolkata and went on to study at the Ecole Superieure Des Beuax-Arts, Paris. His rich and eclectic art practice includes shows like ‘Paintings on Textile’ (Gallery Ganesha, New Delhi, 1992), ‘Works on Wood’ (Gallerie Espace, New Delhi, 1994), ‘Transparencies in Black and White’ (Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi, 2003), besides several solos of paintings, multi-media structures and assemblages, all of which reflect his passionate involvement with Human Rights issues. He has also been involved with activistic, out-reach oriented collaborative work like “Eye Reveal” (presented in collaboration with UNIFEM and Muktangan) an exhibition of photographs and short stories that explored the interplay between gender, violence against women and masculinity.

His most recent show titled ‘To Whomsoever it May Concern’ (Bodhi Art, New York, 2007) held an universal relevance and enquired the existence of true concern. He took his fascination for arthropods even further with this multi-layered series of works that recreated the double-edged anxiety from the days of early colonial expansion. These works were informed by accounts of the discomfort and horror faced by early British officials when they first experienced the ground reality of the Indian subcontinent. Assailed by the images of what they saw as abject poverty, the heat and torrential rains, the swarming ‘giant’ tropical insects, the severely mal-nourished, naked-bodied labourers and the overpowering stench of their humanness, compelled them to ‘tame’ these ‘wild’ lands, and familiarize the alien. Soon, physical, built-structures erected in the colonies, as well as their systems of managerial organization mimicked those back home. In this visceral series, Gupta sought to equate the body of his monstrously hybrid, mutant insect-like creatures with that of the body politic. His creatures rendered in an anachronistically super-modernist style, fitted with sinister, cold-steel mechanical appendages recreated the clinically structured manner in which colonial oppression was injected into very fabric of the Indian identity.

His works pulsate with the tortured energies of discomfort, paranoia, rebellion, and oppression as offset visceral details of disturbing realities are offset imagery that recalls macro-politic of control and structural oppression.

The artist lives and works in New Delhi.