Neeraj Gupta.
Neeraj Gupta (b. 1969) is a magician in makrana marble. His eminence as a specialist in Public Art is widely perceived in India and abroad. His monumental sculptures at IIT, Jammu and Kerala , at the entrance of the tunnel in front of Bharat Mandapam and various places there is an attempt to utilize aspects of the language and thought which he has evolved out of a desire to weld figures and deep space- a tightly knit surface web of interlocking shapes.
In his public art like the monumental work at CCRT (Ministry of Culture) in 2021 he creates large modulations and brilliant monochromatic fields obtained through the difference of values that spread before the viewer. The work does not consist not only of relations of warm and cool, of expansion and contraction, which vary in accordance with the regimes considered between poundage and weight. His handling of makrana stone, bronzes, and metal, its articulation and sense of gesture as a medium, are largely capable of an immediate registration of the movement in time of an intuitive-subjective experience with the culmination of a romantic apogee in his participation in numerous shows in India and across the world that includes Oak Bay Public Art Program, Vancouver, Canada; participation in Jerusalem Biennale in 2019, Nord Art, Germany in 2018, Santorini Biennale, Greece (2016), Beijing International Biennale in 2019, and others.
His outdoor works explain his process, some of his developing transcendental beliefs, and his obsession with creating. He’s an expert of Indian Art & Aesthetics; this is also linked with a deeper realization. He was also a judge in Republic Day Parade in 2024. He works up to have a Master Plan for Public Art for Delhi. For his entire career, he has been able to combine the modernist idiom and subjects with an avant-garde style to great effect.
He has authored a book on Climate Change which was released on the eve of Climate Summit in Paris by the Hon’ble Environment Minister, Govt. of India, He has 8 solo shows to his credit including solo shows at IGI Airport, Jahangir Art Gallery and others, major shows like National Exhibition of Art at Lalit Kala Akademi, including the best sculptor award in 77th Annual Art Exhibition at AIFACS ( 2005). Any attempt to chart Neeraj’s splendid career shall fail to do justice to his immense talent. The various works displayed at various shows are replete with his sheer magnificence of what art could see and show. These come to him in the way of revelation- the specific context in which a human being would limit and define significance. No one else has ever made avant-garde in public art so magnificent and colossus as Neeraj, experimental works so attractive to the general and the cognoscenti, not in the particularities of place and telling, but in the amplitudes of connection, of emotions that attend a tale Indeed, Neeraj combines playful difficulty and willful accessibility in ways that few other present day sculptors have.
