Cosmic Wave
Copper with patina, brass, stainless steel Variable Approx.
16 x 18 X 18 FT 1800 kg
Cosmic Wave emerges from Satish Gupta’s sustained contemplation of the sea, encountered not as spectacle but as a living rhythm. Painted often at the shoreline or from within a boat, the artist observes waves as fleeting forms - each distinct, each present for a brief moment, each destined to dissolve back into the vast ocean from which it arises. The wave, in this sense, mirrors human existence: momentary in its individuality, continuous in its return.
Realised at a monumental scale and weighing nearly 1800 kilograms, the sculpture holds this paradox through material and mass. Copper, worked with patina, becomes a living surface that registers duration, exposure, and duration. These materials do not merely give shape to the form - they condition its meaning. The immense mass of the sculpture arrests a force that is otherwise transient, allowing impermanence to be experienced through permanence. Scale here is not theatrical; it is necessary, enabling the wave to be held at the threshold between emergence and dissolution.
Gupta asks Does the wave before dissolving on the shore - question its destiny? His response is gentle and resolute: there is nothing to fear. The wave completes itself by returning to the ocean. In this worldview, dissolution is not loss but reunion; form is temporary, continuity enduring. The work carries this understanding without sentiment, offering a meditation on life as a brief appearance within a larger, sustaining whole.
