It hangs 130 ft from a hook on the roof of the atrium, this cascade of curly, shimmering steel plates, casting interesting shadows on the wall behind. Around the narrow, sunlit atrium are corporate offices.
This is Binarius, a “technology park” on Airport Road in Pune, built by the Deepak Group (makers of fertilisers and chemicals), and the sculpture is by Tapan Basu, an artist from Mumbai. He worked for years as a scientist at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), and now specialises in outdoor sculptures in stainless steel.
“Hanging sculptures are rarely made,” says Basu, who is 63, but wiry and very focused on his work. “Even if they are made they are much smaller. I have not seen any such hanging sculptures in India myself.” Because the atrium is narrow, the client thought a wall mural would be enough. But Basu suggested something in three dimensions instead.
The result is a long, slender, weightless-looking sculpture, completed in December 2011. From the floor of the atrium looking up, the steel whorls call to mind pencil shavings or curly bits of bark. From higher up, the idea behind Basu’s design becomes clearer. It represents pages from world scriptures; but also calls to mind handwritten Urdu.
“I was told that there should be a global feeling,” he says, “because the business houses sharing the building have a global outlook. So I thought why not have a sculpture that incorporates inscriptions from various cultures around the world, Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan, Native American...?”
The sculpture is in fact unusually light. The capacity of the roof hook was 2 tonnes. “I kept it 50 per cent from the available limit,” the artist says, so his sculpture weighs 1 tonne — just 25 kg for each 6 ft stainless steel page.
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It took three months to design and make, but was installed overnight. “It had to be designed in such a way that it’s not a single piece,” he says. “You have to assemble it from top to bottom.” Each piece was hooked to the last. Basu devised a way to do this from the landings around the atrium, to avoid using tedious scaffolding.
He wishes the atrium were broader: “I would have loved to increase the lateral dimension.” The sculpture is slender so that “somebody could not touch it by extending an arm from the balcony”.
Basu has other large commissions behind him. Apart from two more large atrium sculptures (symbolising “fire” and “growth”) for the Deepak Group, and a 25 ft steel sculpture for a Sayaji Group hotel, all three in Pune and in stainless steel, there is a 33 ft copper sculpture at a street crossing, and a 66 ft stainless steel tower topped with a gold-plated representation of Surya, the sun god, in the middle of an artificial lake at the Reliance petroleum refinery in Jamnagar, Gujarat. He is currently working on two sculptures (symbolising health and the movements of classical dance) for a large new hospital in Bhuj, Gujarat, funded by the Adani Group.
Basu’s best-known sculpture is the Birth of Garuda, a striking abstract piece in copper situated spectacularly on a rock in front of the Nuclear Power Corporation of India office inside BARC. “Garuda took me nine months,” he says. “It was very complicated. There was a steel infrastructure encased in copper sheets. I had to do it singlehandedly, welding and handling that 2 tonne sculpture. I had to do the welding lying on the rough, rocky ground. For hours I had to weld with copper droplets falling all over me, so that was very tedious.” The hanging sculpture, by contrast, took three months.
Much of that time was spent giving the stainless steel plates their special surface treatment. “Texture is a very important aspect of any sculpture,” Basu says. “It gives a tactile quality. I have to experiment with techniques in my studio [in a village near Badlapur, outside Mumbai] to transform metal into sculpture. There is beating, grinding, sanding with a hand-grinder. With a hand grinder, the depth and angle [of grinding] determine how light is reflected.” The result is a colourful shimmer, not a glare.
“It’s not very organic as a medium,” Basu says of steel, “but if you handle it properly you can incorporate an organic quality. Steel sculptures internationally, they are straight lines, they lose the organic quality. If you lose that, not for very long will you like to see that sculpture.”