“You are a hustler,” I told Suchit.
He nodded in agreement.
“I come from a business family. It is in my blood.”
“I don’t think you need to be one any more,” I told him.
“I am trying to change,” he said.
I met Suchit Sahni a couple of years ago. He had been trying to get his paintings into the gallery for some time. Frankly, I did not see them fitting into our programme. I was not convinced by the work, and I saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Then, one day, I noticed a half finished metal car sculpture sitting in the gallery.
“Who created this?” I asked.
The staff told me it was Suchit’s work.
That was the beginning.
Sometimes, it takes a change in medium to make you look at an artist differently. I had not been persuaded by his paintings, but the sculpture made me curious. It was the first time I began to see a possibility in his work that I had not recognised before.
What followed was a series of conversations that gradually became a relationship. Suchit had worked with several galleries and was not particularly receptive to the idea of a gallerist who might question his decisions, offer direction or ask him to reconsider his practice. He had his reservations, and I understood them. Artists learn to protect themselves. They become wary of advice, especially when they have spent years trying to establish an identity and find an audience for their work. Trust takes time, and it cannot be demanded.
For Suchit, the idea that a gallery might engage with him beyond the business of exhibiting and selling his work was unfamiliar territory. For the first time, I felt we were talking about the artist and what he might become, rather than simply the work he could produce and sell.
There is a difference between finding a market for an artist and helping an artist find his direction. The former can sustain a practice. The latter might change it.
Suchit’s move from painting to sculpture has been an important shift. His cars came naturally to him. They were familiar, recognisable and associated with his identity as an artist. There was a certain comfort in making work that people already knew him for. But I felt there was more to explore, and I did not want him to stop at what he had already learnt to do well.
I remember telling him, “This is a start.”
I meant it. The cars were a beginning, not a destination.
It took time for him to consider this possibility. There was reluctance, some resistance and the inevitable uncertainty that comes with allowing someone else to question what you have spent years building. We did not always agree. We still do not. But gradually, Suchit began to entertain a different vision for his work. He began to understand that being challenged did not mean being dismissed, and that changing direction did not require him to abandon everything that had come before.
What makes this shift interesting is the work that has emerged from it.
Suchit’s Nostalgia series draws on his memories of growing up in urban Delhi during the 1980s and 1990s. These are years he remembers with great affection. The objects, buildings and everyday symbols of that time remain vivid in his mind. A kettle, a tape recorder, a car, a building. Things that were once ordinary fixtures of daily life, rarely given a second thought, now carry the weight of memory.
Time has a way of changing the significance of ordinary things. Objects disappear, buildings are demolished or altered beyond recognition, and the details of a particular era slowly recede from collective memory. What was once familiar becomes distant. Sometimes, we do not realise what we have lost until it is no longer there.
Suchit wants to hold on to these things.
He describes the series as an ode to the symbols and fragile memories of his past, recreated in sculptural form. I find this idea compelling because of his insistence on the physical presence of these objects. A memory can be recalled, narrated or photographed, but a sculpture occupies space. It has weight, texture and a material existence. It can be encountered in the present, long after the object it recalls has disappeared from everyday life.
The sculptures become a record of sorts, a physical repository of personal and collective memory. Someone who grew up in Delhi during those decades might recognise an object and find themselves transported to a particular room, street or moment in their life. Someone younger might encounter the same object as a fragment of a world they never knew.
This is where Suchit’s personal memories begin to reach beyond him. The objects may belong to his past, but they are also part of a shared history of urban life. Their familiarity allows others to bring their own memories to the work.
Nostalgia is often dismissed as sentimentality, as a tendency to look backwards and remember the past more fondly than it deserves. I think there is more to it than that. There is value in paying attention to what disappears, in recognising that the ordinary objects and spaces around us carry histories of their own. We rarely preserve them while they are part of our daily lives. We begin to miss them only when they are gone.
Sculpture gives Suchit a way of addressing this loss. He could have continued painting these objects, but the move into three dimensional form changes the relationship between the work and the viewer. These are no longer simply images of things that once existed. They have a physical presence of their own. They occupy the space around us and ask us to look at them as objects, not merely as representations of objects.
For an artist who has spent so much time trying to get his work noticed, there is an interesting contradiction here. His most personal work is concerned with things that might otherwise be forgotten. He wants to preserve the past, even as he tries to move his own practice forward.
Nearly three years after that first encounter with the metal car, Suchit is preparing to present a substantial sculpture from his Nostalgia series at Art Mumbai. I believe this is an important moment for him. The work has the potential to change how the art community, and collectors in particular, perceive his practice. It asks them to look beyond the artist they think they know and consider what he is capable of becoming.
That possibility matters to me. I do not believe a gallerist should simply reinforce what an artist already does well. There are times when the more meaningful contribution is to question, to challenge and to encourage an artist to take a risk. The artist must ultimately make the work, and the work must stand on its own. But the conversation that leads to it can be just as important.
Over our many conversations, I have come to know Suchit beyond his work. He is a genuinely nice man, though he can be thoroughly frustrating at times. He is soft in some ways and unexpectedly brash in others. He talks a great deal and is often convinced that he has everything figured out. Reality then intervenes, as it tends to do, and he discovers that things are rarely as straightforward as he imagined.
I find this both amusing and exasperating.
I also think a little eccentricity is necessary. I like people who are slightly kinky in the head, who are prepared to take risks and who do not always behave as expected. Artists need a degree of that stubbornness. They must be willing to pursue an idea when there is no guarantee that it will work, and to persist when the outcome is uncertain.
Suchit has that instinct. He can be impulsive, overconfident and resistant to advice. He can also be surprisingly cautious when it comes to putting himself on the line. He will not buy a ticket until he knows for certain that his work is going to be displayed. This, from a man who speaks with such conviction that you would think he has already anticipated every possible outcome.
The hustler is never very far away.
I do not think he needs to lose that part of himself. His commercial instinct, his persistence and his ability to keep pushing have helped him get this far. What I hope is that he learns to direct those qualities towards the work itself. There is a point at which persuading people to look at you must give way to making work that holds their attention without persuasion.
The sculpture at Art Mumbai is an opportunity to do precisely that. It is a chance for the work to speak, for the objects he has chosen to preserve to carry their own weight, and for the artist to be seen differently. I am curious to see how people respond, but I am even more interested in what this experience might lead Suchit to do next.
I cannot claim to have figured him out. I doubt he has figured himself out either, despite his occasional insistence to the contrary. There will be more arguments, more conversations and more occasions when I will have to remind him that the world does not always work according to his plans. I expect he will continue to remind me that he comes from a business family.
Perhaps that is what makes the relationship worthwhile. Neither of us has to agree with the other all the time. What matters is that we remain willing to question our assumptions and allow the work to take us somewhere neither of us had anticipated.
I think back to that half finished metal car in the gallery. I had not been looking for a reason to change my mind about Suchit. The sculpture simply made me stop and look again. It led to conversations, disagreements and a shift in the way he thought about his practice. It also made me reconsider what I had initially failed to see.
Now he is preparing to make a larger statement with his Nostalgia series, giving physical form to memories of a city and a time that continue to live in him.
And the hustler? I suspect he will always be there, ready with a pitch, a plan and the conviction that he has everything under control.
I would just like the work to surprise him before he has a chance to explain it.