Parul Gupta

Press Release

Nature Morte is pleased to present a solo show of new works by the artist Parul Gupta. This is the first time the gallery is working with the artist and will be her largest solo show to date. On view will be a range of works: drawings on paper made from ink, charcoal, oil pastel, gold pigments, alone and in combinations; as well as sculptures of painted aluminum.

Gupta’s visual language is born from Minimalism and all of her works appear deceptively simple at first, but with time their complex programs and internal intensities become apparent. Drawings composed from overlapping parallel lines, in two and three colours, seem to defy perception, oscillating in front of the viewer and possessing a vibratory charge. In both a series of works rendered in charcoal and gold pigment and the sculptures, Gupta seduces the viewer with the illusion of the doppelgänger, rife with allusions to paranormal perceptions. Her main subject is the square, yet this most serene of geometric forms is torqued, layered, multiplied, and confounded to create works of heightened tensions.

In an essay on the work of Parul Gupta by Anuj Daga (for a solo project presented by Farah Khan at Red Studio, Mumbai in 2020), the writer illuminates the many references these abstract works can elicit:

“Gupta’s works index and overlap several spatiotemporal graphs that invite closer investigation. Densities of space created in folding, releasing, splitting, dissecting, fading, or strengthening lines within an imagined continuum narrates numerous stories. Are these scores waiting to be sounded into music, or are these barcodes of a number yet to be counted? Are these the unfolded scales of early observatories that were built to map the cartography of the skies; or are these seismographic charts that mark the tectonic shifts to which our everyday gets attuned on ground? Are they streams of microwaves within which we are inevitably swimming or the rhythms of a pulsating organ emanating from within the body? As we consider these questions within the artist’s fine drafted lines, encompassing poetry of mathematics begins to emerge.”