Art all bottled up

With his steel bottle creation, Subodh Gupta joins a long list of art and pop culture Absolut Artist icons

Subodh Gupta’s trademark steel bartan have taken on a new shape —the Absolut vodka bottle. India's best-known (internationally at least) and most expensive contemporary artist has made a four-foot tall sculpture in the iconic shape which will be unveiled this Sunday at an exhibition of the Absolut Art Collection in New Delhi. He’s only the second Indian to have worked on the bottle, the first being fashion designer Manish Arora around two years ago.

It's an honour, considering that the roster of Absolut artists includes some of the biggest names and pop culture icons of recent times — Andy Warhol, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Clemente, Damien Hirst, Gianni Versace, Stella McCartney — and Gupta is well aware of it. "I saw the exhibition in Norway," he says, "around six years ago." That he admits to drinking the stuff must have played a part, too.

For Absolut, the association with Gupta gives a desi stamp to its association with art — an association that goes back to 1985, when Warhol painted the bottle, black against a yellow background, and has now become part of its brand DNA. In an essay on the Absolut website, Dublin-based critic Gemma Tipton recounts an apocryphal tale of Warhol meeting Michel Roux, the US importer of Absolut vodka, at a party, telling him that he liked the bottle so much — even wearing Absolut as a perfume sometimes — and offering to paint it.

The shape Warhol was so enthralled with is, in fact, a version of the traditional Swedish medicine bottle. The Absolut vodka bottles are made at the same glassworks near the company's distilleries in Ahus, Sweden where these medicine bottles were manufactured.

The original plan was to have artists who were already part of the Absolut Art Collection recommend others who could become part of it — so Warhol recommended Keith Haring, who in turn brought in Kenny Scharf and so on. But Abolut seems to have strayed from this, with the company inviting Gupta to be a part of the collection.

Over the years, the collection has grown both in reputation and size to 800 pieces, and is now housed at the Museum of Wine and Spirits in Stockholm. (The Swedish government retained ownership of the collection when V&S, the Swedish company that owned the brand, was acquired by Pernod Ricard.) It is travelling out to Asia for the first time, and after Delhi, will go to Mumbai, Dubai, Sydney, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai.

In her essay, Tipton refers to persisting rumours that Absolut artists were promised free vodka for life as payment. Asked about it, Gupta laughs: “They're paying me enough to ensure I can afford the vodka for life.”