Probir Gupta (b.1960)

His works  pack the kind of visceral energy that has generally evaporated from the more ironic, flamboyant imagery that characterises contemporary Indian painting in particular, and art in general. In the language of mythology, Mayapuri is the world of illusion, the web of enticement that Kabir laments in his poetry. Mayapuri, the Delhi colony, serves as a potent metaphor for Gupta, who sources his scrap iron objects from its wasteland of abandoned military junk. He then uses these objects - as both physical material and evocations - to virtually create a body of mutilated forms that serves as a dominating foreground-background within his paintings.

The figures in his painting in themselves suggest an epic, cinematic dimension. A fat cat merchant, priest or women, one rich and conspicuously androgynous, the others as rough hewn labour. Together they witness the power of the church and upper European cities, the march of industry, financial and sexual control. The evocations of Abu Ghraib and acts of violence in the name of God are powerfully told. The recipients of such controls appear in works like Blue Print and the Dislocated Spine. Here, the waste of the army dump at Mayapuri becomes apocryphal for any such dump where mutating bones and crushed metal float into view. It is as if the back alleys of military detritus have made their way into an art gallery to shock you with their excess. These are images of an unspeakable desolation, no part of the canvas is free from the roiling metallic forms that seem to second best as mock phalluses, lending the notion of toxicity and dominance a deep and invidious dimension.

The Artist lives and works in Delhi.