At the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai, Subodh Gupta’s A Fistful of Sky is one of the artist’s most expansive exhibitions in India in recent years. Curated by Clare Lilley and on view from 3 April to 17 May 2026, the four-floor presentation brings together new commissions, key works from across Gupta’s career, and immersive installations that move between ritual, migration, memory, ruin and renewal. The exhibition is presented by Nature Morte.
“The exhibition title says it all. This project is proof of what becomes possible when Indian contemporary art is given the scale, the ambition and the platform it deserves. And we are just getting started!” Aparajita Jain, Director Nature Morte said about the show.
The exhibition is organised as a spatial ascent, and that structure gives the show its emotional rhythm. Beginning with the body and ending in circulation, it moves upward through shared discipline, dreamlike suspension, historical ruin and kinetic motion, making NMACC’s Art House feel less like a neutral venue than an active participant in the work.
Ritual, discipline and threshold
The first level is grounded in acts of gathering, waiting and crossing. Works such as School (2008), Proust Mapping (2024–26), Stupa (2024) and Door (2007) transform familiar objects into signs of collective behaviour, where repetition becomes form and domestic life expands into sculpture. Gupta’s stainless-steel utensils, cooking vessels and thresholds are not only materials; they are carriers of memory, labour and shared social routine.
In School, the grid of tiffins and stools recalls the artist’s childhood in Bihar, where eating was communal and patience was part of the ritual.
In Proust Mapping, flattened cooking vessels hold the traces of heat, touch and use, reading at once as abstraction and as a record of ordinary labour. The effect is quiet but forceful: the exhibition begins by showing how community is built through repeated gestures.
Dream, shelter and memory
At the centre of the exhibition is the new installation A Fistful of Sky (2025–26), an immersive field of polyester fabric-netted beds that stages rest as something fragile, unstable and deeply social. The beds hold materials that point to rural life, migration, domestic labour and provisional shelter: grass, rubble, cow-dung cakes, buckets, roof tiles, spice-grinding stones, bundled textiles and polished brass set against stone.
This level feels less like a room than a psychological landscape. The final bed, with five vintage television sets, introduces looping films of prayer, transit, death, the river and the tulsi plant, turning biography into recurrence rather than narrative. The work suggests that memory does not unfold neatly; it returns, folds and lingers, just as sleep hovers between vulnerability and protection.
Ruin and deep time
The third level widens the exhibition’s frame to archaeology, survival and deep time. Kingdom of Earth (2016–26) reimagines ancient remains from Delos through monumental structures made of stainless steel, cement, fabric and broken ceramic plates, collapsing the distance between antiquity and the present. Nearby, bronze masks, a scaled prehistoric rhinoceros bone, terracotta vessels, a white moose and an ostrich extend the exhibition beyond human chronology and into a world of displaced ecologies.
Rather than presenting history as a stable past, Gupta treats it as something reactivated through material transformation. Ruin here is not simply decay; it becomes a way to think about continuity, mortality and the persistence of form. The result is less a linear historical argument than a meditation on what survives by changing shape.
Circulation and renewal
At the summit, the exhibition shifts from stillness into movement. In Faith Matters (2007–10), stainless-steel utensils move in continuous loops along conveyor belts, turning the rhythms of cooking and exchange into a kind of mechanical theatre. Gupta’s description — “a sushi bar and also an airport” — captures the work’s central tension: domestic ritual has become global circulation.
This level also introduces paintings from the Inner Garden series, where floral forms bloom, dissolve and reappear in layered colour. These works bring the hand back into the exhibition, softening the hard surfaces of steel and brass with a more intimate register of transformation. The show ends not in resolution but in motion, suggesting that fragility and endurance are inseparable.
What gives A Fistful of Sky its force is the way it enlarges the ordinary without stripping it of specificity. Subodh Gupta’s objects remain recognisable as utensils, beds, vessels, tiles and stones, yet within this exhibition they become images of labour, belief, migration and aspiration. The show is especially resonant in Mumbai, a city defined by transit, density and aspiration, where movement and repetition shape everyday life.
For viewers, the exhibition offers not only scale but also a slow, layered encounter with Gupta’s practice. It is a reminder that the everyday is never merely everyday: in the right setting, it can become architecture, memory, ritual and sky.
Exhibition details
Title: एक मुट्ठी आसमान (A Fistful of Sky)
Artist: Subodh Gupta
Curated by: Clare Lilley
Presented by: Nature Morte
Venue: Art House, Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Mumbai
Dates: 3 April to 17 May 2026
Timings: Tuesday–Thursday, 11 AM–8 PM; Friday–Saturday, 11 AM–10 PM; Sundays closed
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
