Contemporary Sculpture Essay

You may have heard that we are what we eat, aren’t we? And you should agree, while food gives life to us, it also takes it away in our age of total consumption. You can see how this idea was creatively processed by Indian artist Subodh Gupta. He used a model of a skull to reflect antagonisms of modern human culture. His sculpture, Very Hungry God, was prepared in 2006 for the Nuit Blanche festival in Venice. There it was taken on a gondola as a part of parade. Then it was displayed in the Barbes Eglise Saint-Bernard Church near Paris, shown in Daria Zhukova’s art show in Moscow and in the Regent’s Park in London for the Frieze Art Fair.
As you see, the sculpture is made of hundreds of aluminum pans and pots, together making up a ton of weight exactly. I should state that the image of a skull is rather popular in contemporary arts, i.e. Eat Your Veggies (So that one day the veggies may eat you) by Jud Turner or diamond For the Love of God by Damien Hirst, if to name only few. As well as the latter, the work of Gupta is to express the vanity of human nature, but it was also highly influenced by information in newspapers on those soup kitchens in Paris that cooked their dishes with pork ignoring the principles of the Muslims. “It was a strange and twisted form of charity that did not continue for long but raised conflicting ideas of giving and the way we have become now,” Gupta explained (“A Very Hungry God,” 2007).
If you look at the skull, you may also get under the effect of the empty utensils, which is consonant with the emptiness of our existence when it is not filled spiritually.