Singapore Art Week: Kanchana Gupta

By Savita Apte

Sullivan+Strumpf presents a solo exhibition of Indian-born, Singapore-based Kanchana Gupta at Gilman Barracks during Singapore Art Week in January 2022, where the artist continues her visually and conceptually rigorous explorations of the humble tarpaulin.

Gillman Barracks, Singapore. Singapore Art Week 14 – 23 January 2022.

Kanchana Gupta’s latest exhibition pays homage to the humble tarpaulin. For her solo exhibition at Gilman Barracks during Singapore Art Week, Sullivan+ Strumpf present Gupta’s dexterous interweaving of the potentialities of process and materiality—coupled with her indomitable spirit. Originally from India, Gupta currently lives and works in Singapore and her practice connects the two countries in unexpected ways. The two megacities of Singapore and Mumbai, each of which the artist has called home, offer, via the medium of her works, the means for a personal exploration of, and a thoughtful response to, the urban environments she inhabits—resonating with inhabitants not only of these metropoles but with any person who has ever lived the peculiar and changeful existence of the very large city.

Kanchana Gupta Edges and Residues 22 - Steel Blue, Cadmium Red and White on Paynes Grey and White (detail), 2020, stacked oil paint skins burnt and stripped off jute, mounted on wooden structure 73 x 131 cm. Photo: Kanchana Gupta.

The global metropolis appears to reverberate, construction and development trending entire precincts towards residential gentrification—with a concentration of phototropic skyscrapers bracketed within the parameters of newly imagined business districts. The rapid urbanisation of Singapore, visually tracked by the swathes of tarpaulin that colour the city state’s skyline, mirrors Gupta’s memories of Mumbai’s own momentous building spurt and the subsequent proliferation of tarpaulin covered urban slums that created a collaged horizon in blue. It is specifically this material, indexical of transitional sites, that continues to inform Gupta’s practice.

Over the last half a dozen years, Gupta has pursued her fascination with the materiality of paint with the excavational zeal of an archaeo-anthropologist, directing her investigations into the physicality of the medium. Examining it through processes such as heating, burning and tearing, creating flattened, wall-based works and sculptural installations. In each series, Gupta continues to explore the potentialities of studio practice juxtaposing oil paint in with culturally loaded matter like vermillion powder, henna, silk and sandalwood powder, or otherwise her more quotidian materials such jute and tarpaulin. Her process involves a continuous mining of weaves, textures, patterns and structures through which she mediates an ongoing social commentary on the conditions and visibility of migration. In an earlier series, Works-In-Progress, 2017, the artist focused attention on the plight of migrant labourers who facilitate urban transformation, only to be marginalised themselves by the gentrification. In 458.32 Square Meters, 2019, unexpected appositions of iconic identity and social symbolism are in turn manipulated, to express the accrual of lived experience and the psychological landscapes of rupture. Pushing her limits, Gupta stacked, heaped, and folded these industrially compressed sculptural forms, cleaving to the exposed personal geologies of loss and longing contained therein. Gupta’s laborious interventions, harness both studio and industrial process to underscore the tension between deconstruction and reconstruction. In each work, she contemplates a series of investigations, and each series becomes the foundation for the next. The upcoming solo presentation, during Singapore Art Week, extends Gupta’s earlier meditations on sculpture and intentionally oscillates between two-and three dimensionality.

In her studio, in preparation for the exhibition, Gupta manipulates paint in an unhurried, meditative ritual. Layer after layer, paint is loaded with studied repetition onto a tarpaulin base to form skins. The accumulation created through this process, often amounting to thirty-five coatings or more, is diligently, almost ceremonially flayed. The delicate accretions, with the exposed cutis, (which now retains the traces, patterns and memory of the tarpaulin substructure) are grafted on both sides of a construction canvas. In the process, the inverted order of the membranes renders the cutis uppermost, exposing the texture and patterning of the parent tarpaulin. These dermal constructs are then industrially printed to introduce pigmentations, in turn reflecting the authentic colour combinations of contemporary construction site tarpaulin. The ragged edges of the dermal layers are trimmed and cropped, and the selvages are folded to create the thicker hems required to receive the eyelets. In a departure from her earlier series, the skin tarpaulins here are strung up, splayed out, held in place by steel suspension wires which affix them to steel frames. Their very monumentality blurring the line between painting and sculpture, the real and ersatz, accentuating the importance of context.

All through, whether within studio or industrial process, the handmade-ness is never masked, never suppressed, it shouts silently from the margins. Despite this, there is an alchemist’s sleight of hand—at first glance, visually and texturally, the tarpaulin sheets look deceptively like found objects—discarded tarpaulin lifted from construction sites. In reality, however, they are the culmination of meticulously controlled transformations.

Gupta consistently addresses powerful and evocative themes—urbanisation, labour and migration. With this series Gupta excavates further and deeper, to examine the relationship between skin and identity. Far from being a simple surface, skin plays a key role in the fundamentals of meaning and identity. Perception of skin weighted with pre-conceptions can lead to false suppositions, as Gupta so accurately asserts through her tarpaulin works. The works in this series explore questions of identity using a subtle visual vocabulary and a simplicity of form that belie deeply reflective thought processes and introspection. With her dermal tarpaulins, Gupta commences an interrogation into the complex social interactions whereby identity is both externally conferred and internally assembled—and it is the tension caused by the encroachment of one over the other that Gupta seeks to emphasise.

(Excerpt from the catalogue essay accompanying the exhibition.)