Artist Satish Gupta showcases newest artworks in 'Zen Thunder, Zen Silence' at Jehangir Art Gallery

The show presents a limited edition portfolio of works created by Gupta including new work titled `Zenga`, `Wandering Cloud` and a large sculpture titled `Brahmand`.

Celebrated artist Satish Gupta has been navigating his personal journey of contemplations through a lifetime of creating meditative works. His quest takes him through painting, sculptures, poetry, calligraphy and an intuitive seeking of a spiritual space beyond the mundane route of prescribed living.

In this show titled "Zen Thunder, Zen Silence" presented in Mumbai by Gallery Art & Soul at the Jehangir Art Gallery from November 22 to November 27, the artist returns to Mumbai after a gap of seven years. This show presents a limited edition portfolio of works created by Gupta including new work titled 'Zenga', 'Wandering Cloud' and a large sculpture titled 'Brahmand' is a large sculpture, both of which will be on display.

It was a moment of epiphany when the mesmeric quality of the intangible while seeking calm in chaos was revealed to him. That calm he believes, is a gift from Buddha. Perhaps Buddha is holding the artist's hands on his journey through life with his creative companions: a brush, paint, some sculpting tools and an endless curiosity in cosmic meditations. While the galaxies swirl inside him as if in slow motion, Buddha appears at multiple moments of Satish's creative wanderings. For Satish, Buddha in fact, resides within him; and sometimes he resides within Buddha… as experienced in Sri Lanka during the Tsunami. He was miraculously saved by a whim of constellations that had placed him at that moment in the ancient Dambulla Caves instead of the hotel he was to be in, which got washed away with many of its occupants.

As Satish contemplates, "Once you realise this spiritual truth, you begin to comprehend the tremendous beauty in the ephemeral body of nothingness, that is the formless nature of the Divine… beyond time and space, that is the absolute, the supreme consciousness which pervades everything."

And from this seeding of thought, blossomed ‘Aham Brahmasmi' (‘The Formless Divine'), a sculpture in copper where the self is the cosmos and inhabiting it is a kinetic force of the world with light flowing out of its chest like a pulse of knowledge. This light, this luminosity is a silent presence in the ‘Zenscapes' of his mind. This is also where the clouds that he was mesmerised with as a child reappear in ‘Wandering Clouds', sculpted onto metal floating past the moon that seems to be lost in its own reverie.

Serving as an intersection between visual experience and philosophical musings, art becomes a vehicle for journeying into spaces where one rediscovers layers of enquiry, beginning to unpeel the rhetoric of manufactured living to a tranquil space of introspection. This has become a recurring motif for the artist.