Younger Artists Soar at Saffronart On-Line Auction

For those who have been following Indian contemporary art over the past few years, you can probably remember when the market was idling on the runway, waiting to take off. It wasn’t that long ago when Progressive Artist Group works shocked the market by garnering prices in the six-figure range; today, it no surprise when a Souza, Vaitonde, Mehta, or Raza sells for over a million dollars. On March 12 –13, Saffronart’s spring online auction may have shown that post-PAG artists may be the next group waiting in the wings for a similar surge upward in prices.

Works by Subodh Gupta, born in 1964, were an example of this surge, who along with Atul Dodiya, born in 1959, Shibu Natesan, 1966, T. V. Santhosh, 1968, Jagannath Panda, 1970, and Surendran Nair, born in 1956, are getting prices unimagined not very long ago.

Nair’s commentary on identity and sociopolitical change, his oil on canvas, Doctrine of the Forest: An Actor at Play (Cuckoonebulopolis) painted in 2007, was the big winner of the sale, selling for a shattering $558,969 USD*. Not far behind was an untitled oil on canvas painted by Subodh Gupta that took a final tally of $477,250. For good measure, his painting Let Me Make My Damn Art, estimated to sell in the $60,000 - $70,000 range, instead went down for a whopping $437,000. And his sculpture of stainless steel kitchenware entitled Feast for Hundred and Eight Gods 2 closed at $209,875. Panda’s Untitled acrylic and fabric on canvas, fell at a remarkable $353,625, estimated pre-sale at $65,790 - 78,950. Natesan’s hyper-realistic images in Each One Teach One, an oil on linen, doubled estimates and sold for $281,448.

Santhosh, too, is making his presence felt on the modern Indian art scene—two oils on canvas, an Untitled and Across An Unresolved Story II, containing thermographic, x-ray like imagery, sold for $232,875 each. Predictably, Atul Dodiya’s works did well, although he was a bit overshadowed his contemporaries. His piece Vansha Vriksha , a watercolor, acrylic and marble dust on paper sold for $208,150; his Bapu Breaking his Fast, an acrylic on canvas, for $104,650; his enamel paint and synthetic varnish on laminate titled Shri Jivan Chaya of Gandhi Nagar (with 17th Wife board Madhuben and 18th Wife Jayashriben) for $172,500.

Three other works, Death of a Snake Charmer by Bharti Kher (born in 1969), Baiju Parthan’s (1956) diptych of cryptic images called Source Code - Benedict, and Anju Dodiya’s Daphne, also broke the five-figure mark. Not far behind in the upper four-figures were works by G. R. Iranna, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Rashid Rana, Jittish Kallat, N. S. Harsha, Sudhanshu Sutar, and Riyas Komu.

Every one of the 119 works in the two-day event was sold, with three quarters of them surpassing their estimated values. There were no PAG works in the catalogue for this, one of the first Indian art auctions of 2008. One that went very, very well without their contribution.

* (Prices inclusive of Buyers Premium)