From his earliest engagements with landscape, Gupta's interest was drawn towards immersion beyond representation. Nature was approached as a living field - entered, sensed, and absorbed. These early works already carried the foundations of an inward orientation, where seeing became a form of listening and form a means of attunement. Landscape, in this context, functioned less as subject matter than as a conditionn through which breath and stillness were learned. This inward sensibility deepened through his engagement with the human figure, particularly in the portraits emerging from his time in the Thar desert. Here, the body appears as presence - marked by endurance, labour, and lived intensity. These works are neither romanticised nor documentary; they carry a quiet gravity, holding vulnerability and strength in careful balance. The figure becomes a site through which experience gathers, allowing the human form to register weight, gesture, and restraint.
Periods of personal upheaval further shaped this trajectory. Illness, recovery, and introspection entered the practice as reorientation rather than rupture. The body
became a ground through which meaning was negotiated and sustained. Drawings, paintings, and writings from this period reflect a heightened sensitivity to fragility and rhythm, and a commitment to continuing the act of making as a form of listening. It is here that the practice acquires a distinctly performative dimension-not as display, but as an embodied enactment of sustained engagement.
As Gupta's work extended into sculpture, the language of making expanded without abandoning its inner logic. Copper, bronze, gold, and scale introduced weight, resistance, and duration. These materials do more than carry form; they register touch, effort, and pause. The artist has often spoken of the necessity for life - chi - to enter the work, without which material and form remain inert. Sculpture thus becomes a site of convergence, where matter, body, and sensibility meet through the act of making.
Across this evolution, repetition remains central as a mode of inquiry - like a chant,
where vibrations of sound gather and disperse. Circles are drawn and redrawn, figures surface and recede, forms appear and dissolve. What might be understood as shunya - emptiness - operates not as absence but as a generative interval, where stillness is not the lack of movement but a condition of composure through which form gains clarity over time. Repetition becomes a way of knowing, and making takes on the cadence of a contemplative practice carried out through the hands, shaping a refined visual language sustained through return. Within this language, making becomes meditative and attention assumes the quality of devotion. The work recalls cyclical rhythms of becoming - creation, dissolution, and renewal - echoing a worldview in which time is not linear but circulatory.
This approach draws deeply from Eastern modes of learning, not as philosophy to be enacted, but as a way of attending to and inhabiting the world. Knowledge is cultivated through doing; understanding arises through sustained engagement. Mind, body, and breath operate together, shaping a consciousness that is neither abstract nor didactic, but which remains grounded, alert, and embodied. To encounter these works is to enter a similar mode of engagement - one shaped by time, proximity, and receptivity.
The exhibition approaches Satish Gupta’s practice as a continuum - bringing together painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, and writing, allowing these modes toconverse across space and time. Rather than functioning as discrete categories, these forms operate as interconnected extensions of a single sensibility. This constellation reflects the breadth of Gupta’s practice while sustaining its internal coherence - where shifts in medium do not signal departure, but continuity. Each work becomes a point of passage into a shared field of experience, encouraging the viewer to slow down, to dwell, and to encounter the work through duration rather than immediacy.
Haiku of a Still Mind frames this sensibility with precision. Like a haiku, the work condenses lived experience without closure, holding meaning lightly while allowing depth to resonate through restraint. Stillness here is not stasis, but composure - a centering through which form, thought, and perception come into clarity. The exhibition does not seek resolution or conclusion; instead, it offers a space of sustained presence, where looking gradually shifts into listening, and where engagement itself becomes a way of being with the work.
