A gun becomes a typewriter. A chair sprouts a tree branch. A baby stroller cradles a urinal. These are not just reimagined objects in Gautam Bhatia’s latest exhibition, All the Beauty, but contradictions cast in steel and wood, a sharp satire filled with unease. “We live in a distraught world,” Bhatia says. “There was never a time when you could say yes, now life is peaceful. There are wars, forest fires, floods, terrorism, and authoritarian rulers. Where does art position itself in such a world?”
The exhibition’s title, Bhatia admits, is deliberately misleading, coming from a lifelong conviction that even amid chaos, art must hold a sliver of beauty. “The merged objects perhaps reflect something of that deranged reality, paranoia, and a submerged optimism,” he explains. By fusing ordinary objects until they appear like natural extensions of each other, he transforms the banal into something unsettling. “By itself, the object performs a single recognisable function, but its fusion with another turns it into an object of emotion. Emotion objectified.”
He calls this method “exaggerated reality”, a distortion that liberates art from formulaic prettiness. “Art needs to be free from reality, and exaggeration is one way to free it,” he says. To him, India’s dreary landscapes of standardised PWD guesthouse paintings—sunsets over Kerala backwaters, tribal women carrying firewood—are evidence of art’s surrender to banality. His response is to provoke disbelief, even mistrust. “What you see you no longer believe. If there’s an interesting work of art, you are sure it’s been assembled by AI; a unique piece of writing, surely, it’s been scripted using ChatGPT. With today’s easy availability of pictorial and literary tech, you begin to doubt all forms of original human endeavors.”
This anxiety about originality, he insists, is both global and deeply Indian. “We are taught to believe in the accomplishments of other cultures and doubt our own abilities.” Satire, for him, is not indulgence but survival. “The farcical character of the fusion of unlikely objects is essential in India, where satire is taken seriously. It becomes important to push the boundaries of the macabre and the ordinary, till a state of satire is achieved.”
For Bhatia, provocation is essential. “Art is a place of absurdity, of the impossible, and the shameful,” he says. “But its exploitation is far too commercial for it to have any serious impact today.”
Contradiction is his chosen method. His sculptures embrace paradox, uncertainty, and misinterpretation. “Contradiction is critical in establishing a connection with a work of art,” he says. “By juxtaposing mismatched objects, the artworks begin to create paradoxical moments of disquiet and disillusion.”
All the Beauty does not promise resolution. It refuses to. “The sculpture can only be critical of today’s society, but it offers no resolution,” Bhatia admits. And yet, his work asks us not just to admire beauty, but to reckon with how fragile, and how absurd, it really is.