In Nature Morte’s New Delhi gallery, a crate of mangoes sits on a sewing machine stand. The guard next to the crate isn’t part of the installation. But he might as well be.

'Baskets in front of hut’, photograph from the Isamu Noguchi Foundation.

Part of a new exhibition titled Opaque Emblems curated by Peter Nagy, the crate of mangoesSubodh Gupta’s Another F***ing Mango’is an example of the readymade art that the show seeks to highlight. Pioneered by Frenchman Marcel Duchamp in 1917most famous for putting a urinal on a pedestal and adding his signature as a flourish to create Fountain’ readymade elevates ordinary objects to artworks to encourage viewers to look at both those objects and the concept of art itself in new ways.

Photograph from Bollingen travels, Indonesia, c. 1953. (Courtesy: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York)

Running through January 5, along with Gupta the show includes works by various notable painters, sculptors and photographers who have drawn on the conceit of readymade in their work: Atul Dodiya, Louise Lawler, Isamu Noguchi, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Dayanita Singh.

Gupta’s mangoes, cast in bronze and then painted in oils, blur the lines between realism and abstraction, offering an ode to a time when mangoes were everywhere and sometimes guarded. In Mumbai-based Dodiya’s artwork, two cabinets house a miniature figure, lying as if he is in a coffin, as well as photographs Dodiya shot in various museums and facsimiles of art works by other famous artists like On Kawara and Lucio Fontana. Thus, in these cabinets, Dodiya is both an artist and a curatorquestioning museum categories and how value is ascribed to objects in the same way as Duchamp.

Subodh Gupta with his installation. (Photo: India Today/Rajwant Rawat)

Works by Americans Louise Lawler, a Pictures Generation artist, and Isamu Noguchi, as well as Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images of industrial tools from his 2004 Mechanical Forms’ series also evoke Duchamp’s philosophy, as do Dayanita Singh’s photographs of bundles of official papers wrapped in faded red cloth from her 2016 Time Measures’ series.

Dayanita Singh's 'Time Measures'. (Photo courtesy: Nature Morte)

Readymade is a potent concept. People are unaware of the artist’s practice and these are not transparent and easy to understand and that’s why I call it Opaque Emblems, he says. Because these are not opaque objects.