Shilpa Gupta. One Palm Closer to the Sky

One of the most influential voices in international contemporary art, Shilpa Gupta explores language, censorship, mobility and the structures that shape individual lives and freedom. Working across sculpture, light installations, video, sound, and performance, Gupta creates works that shift between territories and languages, and between singularity and collectivity, intimacy and public life, through works that couple conceptual rigour and accessibility.
One Palm Closer to The Sky presents a series of new productions that explores the pivotal themes of Gupta’s work: her interest in language and text, the active involvement of spectators, the reworking of everyday objects and the capacity to create short-circuits between art and life, partly through interventions that move out of institutional spaces only to take root in the public sphere. 
The project forms part of the artist’s broader exploration of the relationship between the individual and the systems of control that shape their existence, and of the way in which the media, language and institutions shape our perception of ourselves and the world. Within this exploration, One Palm Closer to The Sky focuses in particular on that sense of hope which, after generations of struggles for freedom, continues to endure, even as it appears today to be faltering in the face of the growing rise of authoritarian tendencies on a global scale.
Through the work of Shilpa Gupta, who critically examines narratives of identity, belonging and boundary, the GAM’s nineteenth-century collection – a testament to a historical period in which these concepts took shape – re-engages with the tensions of the present.
With an exhibition itinerary that sets out from the museum courtyard and unfolds across the five ground-floor galleries, the exhibition offers an overview of Shilpa Gupta’s practice, highlighting her ability to transform research into experience and to make art a tool for inquiry and critical reflection, capable of opening up spaces for listening, imagination and dialogue.

One Palm Closer to the Sky by Shilpa Gupta forms part of the long-standing partnership between Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna, which since 2021 has presented a new annual exhibition project, aimed at creating dialogue between contemporary art and the gallery’s historic spaces and permanent collection.
The Furla Series is the project through which, since 2017, Fondazione Furla has organised exhibitions in partnership with leading Italian art institutions, with an all-female programme designed to celebrate and promote the contributions of women artists to contemporary culture.

Shilpa Gupta (born 1976) lives and works in Mumbai, India, where she studied sculpture at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts from 1992 to 1997. She has held solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Centro Botín in Santander, the Arnolfini in Bristol, OK in Linz, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem, Amant in New York, the Voorlinden Museum and Gardens in Wassenaar, the Barbican in London and the Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi, among others. In 2023, she held a joint solo exhibition with Marisa Merz at MAXXI L’Aquila, and in 2021, a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. 

Shilpa Gupta has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 58th Venice Biennale (2019), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2018), the Gothenburg Biennial (2017), the Berlin Biennale (2014), the New Museum Triennial (2009), the Sharjah Biennial (2013), the Biennale de Lyon (2009), the Gwangju Biennale (2008), the Yokohama Triennale (2008), and the Liverpool Biennial (2006). She has also exhibited at biennial events in Auckland, Melbourne, Seoul, Havana, Sydney, Yogyakarta, Echigo-Tsumari, Shanghai, Houston and others.

Her works are to be found in major collections, including: Tate Modern, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, Louisiana Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, National Gallery of Canada, ZKM, Voorlinden Museum, Mori Museum, M+ Museum, Astrup Fearnley Museum, KOC Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Ishara Art Foundation, Jameel Arts Centre, Burger Collection, Kiran Nadar Museum and Devi Art Foundation
Her solo show What Still Holds is currently on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

Cover photo by: Truth, 2026, Photo Andrea Rossetti.