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Anish Kapoor
Anish KAPOOR (the older of the three), has an auction track record going back 20 years. His best sculptures that usually change hands for 6-figure sums have shown excellent resistance to the current crisis. On 5 February 2009 at Sotheby’s in London, an sans titre work in stainless steel (1996) actually fetched more than expected when it sold for £840,000 (c. €936,000) versus an upper estimate of £700,000. However, Kapoor has not had any 7-figure results over recent months and his most expensive works have all been bought in. On 11 November 2008, a splendid alabaster sculpture estimated at 2 to 3 million dollars went unsold at Sotheby’s. Before the crisis, the quality of the work would have almost certainly guaranteed a new record for the artist. Indeed, his current record was set on 1 July at Sotheby’s in London for another alabaster sculpture which fetched £1.72m (€2.17m or $3.42m). Kapoor experienced a further setback on 24 November 2008 when his monumental aluminium installation (5 metres wide) Mountain was bought in at Bonhams in Dubai.

Subodh Gupta
Subodh GUPTA perfectly illustrates the price explosion of Contemporary Indian art. Unknown to the international art market before 2005 when works he created in the 1990s could be acquired for between €4,000 and €10,000, one of his pieces (Before the Plunge ) quadrupled its price estimate the following year when it fetched the equivalent of €35,300 on 29 March 2006 at Sotheby’ in London. From that date on, demand for his work became so intense that not one single Subodh Gupta auction lot remained unsold … until the month of October 2008! Since then, eleven pieces have been bought in at all the major international auction venues including Paris, London, and New York? However Hong-Kong was where the first signs of unease first appeared when Sotheby’s bought in a 4-metre canvas by Gupta on 4 October. The following month, the failed sale of Vehicle for Seven Seas III at Christie’s New York (estimated $300,000 – $400,000) confirmed a sharp contraction. In fact, on 3 April 2008, a very similar work from the same series as Vehicle for Seven Seas tripled its lower estimate at Artcurial in Paris when it fetched €425,000. Subodh Gupta has a solid international reputation and his work has been acquired by a number of private and public collections. However, today collectors have neither the available cash nor the appetite for risk to bid two or three times over the published price estimates. On 30 June 2008, for example, the winning bidder at Christie’s in London invested £260,000 (€330,000) in a piece entitled Dubaï to Calcutta #19 . In October 2008, a very similar sculpture entitled Oman to Madras sold for considerably less at £115,000, (€148,000) at Phillips de Pury & Company in London.

Santosh T.V.
Demand for TV SANTOSH’s work accelerated in a matter of months. His very first painting to sell at a New York auction in March 2006 (for the equivalent of €11,600) doubled its estimated price. Entitled Who’s war is it?, this oil on canvas painted in 2005 is part of a series that also includes a larger version that fetched $38,000 (€28,500) on 21 March 2007. In September 2007, Santosh posted his first auction result above €100,000. The painting – Across an unresolved Story (2005) – more than quadruped its upper estimate when it sold for $180,000 (c. €130,000) at Christie’s in New York. In 2008, he crossed the €100,000 line on six other occasions… but not once in 2009. His best result so far this year has been HKD600,000 (€55,400) for an oil on canvas painted in 2005 entitled Hundred Square Feet of curses at Christie’s on 24 May.

Since the beginning of 2009, the price fall is harsh: around -45% between January and June 2009…

On the other hand, Modern Indian artists have been showing better resistance to the art market crisis. In fact they seem frankly immune to it! Jogen CHOWDHURY (born in 1939) and Francis Newton SOUZA (born in 1924) both tripled their estimates supplied by Sotheby’s at its Indian Art sale on 16 June 2009. Jogen Chowhury even signed his new record with a 1979 water-colour entitled Day Dreaming which fetched £310,000 (€364,000). According to some sources, the good results at this sale (where 69% of the lots found buyers) were linked to the morale-boosting effect of the May elections in India. The young Jitish KALLAT (born in 1974) may also have benefited from this effect at Christie’s Asian art sale on 24 May (eight days after the elections) when two of his works elicited very good results, notably, Rickshawpolis 9 which fetched twice its estimate at HKD1.3m (€105,000).

Source – artprice.com

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A stock-market rebound in cities such as Hong Kong and China, fueled by economic recovery, is reviving interest in art purchases among wealthy Asians, said Misung Shim, managing director of Seoul Auction’s Hong Kong office. A prevailing economic slump in Europe and the U.S. has made Western art more affordable in recent months and helped spur Asian buying.

Auction prices for Western contemporary artists have slid between 30 percent and 50 percent because of the credit crisis, said dealers. Sales of Impressionist and contemporary works at the June London auctions fell 70 percent to 165.9 million pounds ($274 million), according to figures compiled from Sotheby’s, Christie’s International and Phillips de Pury & Co.

“Many Asian collectors have always understood and loved Western art,” said Shim, 41, in a telephone interview. “This happens to be a good time to buy.” Chinese, Japanese and residents of Hong Kong are among Asia’s biggest buyers of Western art, she said.

South Korea’s largest art-auction house, which held its first sale in Hong Kong on Oct. 7, said vividly colored works by established artists like Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein and Damien Hirst are especially popular.

Hirst Butterflies
At Seoul Auction’s May 15 sale in Hong Kong, Hirst’s “Tranquility,” from the artist’s Butterfly Series, fetched HK$13.4 million ($1.7 million), his most-expensive work at an Asian sale. The buyer was an Asian collector, the company said, declining to give details. In November 2006, Hong Kong real-estate magnate Joseph Lau paid $17.4 million for a Mao portrait by Warhol, a record at that time.

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Anish Kapoor (British, b. 1954), Mountain, aluminium, constructed from 120 water-jet cut 2 cm thick aluminium layers mounted on an internal structure 255 cm. high, 500 cm. wide, 281 cm. deep. Estimate: $1,800,000 – 2,600,000
LONDON.- ‘Mountain’ by Turner Prize winning Anish Kapoor is to be sold at Bonhams next sale of modern contemporary Arab, Iranian, Indian and Pakistani art in Dubai on 24 November.
Constructed from 120 water-jet cut 2 cm thick aluminium layers mounted on an internal structure, this is a rare opportunity to own a piece by one of the most influential sculptors of his generation.
Viewed from the outside, Anish Kapoor’s Mountain rises in front of us like a solid, invincible structure. Executed with formidable precision, its 120 aluminium layers lock together and, at the same time, convey the rugged energy of a mountain surging out of the elemental rock. It possesses an imposing air of grandeur, furrowed and restless yet able to elicit a profound sense of awe in the onlooker. We find ourselves seduced by the challenge of scaling its heights, in order to feel an even greater exultation and release when reaching the top.
Kapoor, however, is not content with engendering a straightforward feeling of delight. His work is complex, and its multi-layered meanings become clear once we succeed in peering over the apex of Mountain. For there, instead of a creating a peak or even a reassuringly flat ledge, he leads our eyes down into a void. Suddenly, without any warning, we find ourselves confronted by absence rather than presence. The mountain’s rim is disconcertingly thin, and anyone brave enough to stand there would be in danger of losing balance.
Looking into the depths of this hollow structure, we feel giddily caught up in the striations running along its sides. They generate a powerful linear rhythm, leading us down towards the darkest depths of this mesmeric, unforgettable sculpture. We grow conscious of the seismic forces which created our world so many centuries ago, especially at the points where Kapoor brings one curve of the mountain’s interior into tactile contact with another. He makes us feel this momentous encounter within our own bodies. We are caught up in its visceral drama. And, most arrestingly of all, Kapoor sucks us deep into the whirling forces at work here. It has the potency of a vortex. Only the most intrepid explorer would venture down into its ominous darkness.
The absolute assurance of Kapoor’s tour de force marks a high point in his career, and proves that he is enjoying a formidable maturity.
Although often linked with Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon and others who have done so much to revitalise contemporary British sculpture, he stands alone. The first nineteen years of his life were spent in India, as the son of a Hindu father and a mother whose family had emigrated from Baghdad. Living for most of the time in a small town outside Delhi, he did not grow up with any special devotion to art. But the Indian insistence on painting and sculpture’s relationship with religion, most spectacularly in the great temples which he visited as a child, had a profound influence on his subsequent work.
Not that Kapoor was ignorant of western alternatives. He already had a wide knowledge of the European tradition before coming to England in 1973, and studying at the Hornsey and Chelsea schools of art. Understandably, though, this interest was quickened most keenly by western artists with a strong spiritual dimension in their work: Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Yves Klein and above all Joseph Beuys, whose emphasis on the artist as a shaman with redemptive powers had a special significance for the young Kapoor.
Only in 1979, during a return visit to India, did he appreciate how his native inheritance could best be harnessed to the work he was producing in London. The luminous powder colours sold outside the temples, for use in religious rituals, came as a revelation to him. So did the devotional carvings within the shrines, where the god Shiva seemed capable of fusing intense physicality with an aura of remoteness.
The same union of opposites soon informed the sculpture Kapoor made back in England. He began applying powder colours to forms reminiscent of fruit, breasts and mountains. Brilliant yellows, blues and reds gave his work an immediate sensuous appeal. But these shimmering, seductive presences also had an other-worldly quality. Even as it enhanced their ripe and often erotic allure, the soft powder had a disembodying effect. The work seemed on the point of melting, and Kapoor often placed a number of pieces in groups or long lines to reinforce the idea of an infinite series.
At once enticing and enigmatic, his sculpture could not easily be related to the work of his contemporaries in the 1980s. While Tony Cragg incorporated ready-made objects, scavenged from the scrap-heap of late twentieth-century urban society, Kapoor pointed towards an older and more meditative way of life. His work often looked as if it had been laid out for a ceremonial purpose, nowhere more impressively than in a vast congregation of red sandstone boulders called Void Field. They formed the centrepiece of the superb exhibition he staged as Britain’s official representative at the 1990 Venice Biennale. Filling the room with their rough-hewn bulk, they looked like a cluster of rocks occupying a primordial religious site. But all this solidity was undermined by the small circular marks punctuating the top of each block. Close scrutiny revealed that they were holes, leading the eye down to an immense and disturbing emptiness deep inside. The weight and mass of the sandstone were subverted by this inky vacuum. Plain statement gave way to conundrum, and material certainty was replaced by a haunting awareness of the unknown.
In the early 1990s, after Kapoor won the Turner Prize at the age of 37, he began working on even grander projects. Unafraid of thinking on a monumental scale, he collaborated with the architect David Connor on a tower for the 1992 Expo in Seville. Visitors approached the entrance up a 45 metre-long ramp curving round the lower half of the structure. They then found themselves standing in an oval room, with polished plaster walls lit only by a hole in the roof. The circle of light it cast on the floor contrasted very dramatically with a real hole nearby. And the bulbous cavity beneath the hole, occupying an alarming amount of space, was painted blue because, as Kapoor explained, “blue makes a much better black than black does.” Exploring the entire structure amounted to an eerie experience. Once entered, the lofty building’s seemingly impregnable solidity gave way to an ethereal alternative, offering stillness and unfathomable mystery within.
Over the last decade, Kapoor’s swiftly expanding international reputation has provided him with opportunities to produce even more ambitious and visionary work. Take Taratantara, the spectacular temporary installation he made for the Baltic building at Gateshead in 1999. At that stage, the gigantic former Flour Mills had been completely emptied. It was a shell, waiting to be transformed into an ‘art factory’, and Baltic’s director Sune Nordgren asked Kapoor to work there. Taratantara’s jubilant title hinted at the experience to come. A blazing red PVC membrane was stretched over the open end wall. But it curved inwards as well, terminating in a throat. The aperture tempted you into the building. And there Kapoor delivered a flamboyant visual blow, comparable in impact with the sound Joshua made when he brought down the walls of Jericho. Sprouting into the form of a double trumpet, Taratantara stretched right across the 170-foot void. The redness, combined with the swollen size, stunned viewers walking underneath. Yet its taut skin showed how rigorous Kapoor can be, giving his vaulting apparition a remarkable amount of tensile strength.
Then, in October 2002, he went even further at Tate Modern. Confronted by the overwhelming vastness of its Turbine Hall, few artists could respond with the audacity and verve he commanded. Many visitors were astounded by the impact of the sculpture he installed there. For Kapoor invited them to encounter three colossal, enveloping cavities, stretching out like the mouths of monumental trumpets from an organic form that arched its way through the immense space at his disposal. By calling the sculpture Marsyas, he stirred mythological memories of the bloody flaying which Apollo inflicted on a hapless satyr’s body. But Kapoor’s Marsyas was far less violent and unnerving than Titian’s late painting of the same theme. It provoked above all a sense of awe in onlookers, who found themselves wondering at the combination of boldness and enigma that gave the work its fascination.
Kapoor’s ability to involve viewers of all ages in his art ensures the lasting success of the titanic piece made for Chicago’s new park. Here, on a site also enlivened with new buildings by Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano, he has produced a stainless steel gate sculpture containing a passage through to a vast reflective chamber within. It proves, once again, that Kapoor has a boundless, supple and open-minded capacity to extend himself in refreshing new directions. Far from settling for a predictable identity, he is prepared to take risks and ambush us with sculptural surprises.
Bonhams would like to thank Richard Cork for his invaluable assistance in cataloguing this lot.
Source – Art Daily

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If you’re going to visit only one museum this summer, make it the Institute of Contemporary Art, and make it soon. The Anish Kapoor exhibition closes September 7. “Past, Present, and Future” is the first museum survey in the United States of the London-based artist’s sculpture in more than 15 years, and many of the works are on view here for the first time.

Fourteen of Kapoor’s abstract pieces made since 1980 are installed in the ICA’s large gallery, creating a stunning contemporary environment that challenges perception. The viewer enters a different world with different rules. Some pieces look flat, but are actually three dimensional. Alternatively, some that appear multi-dimensional are flat. Classic shapes – primarily circles and rectangles — are deceptively complex, constructed in a variety of synthetic and natural materials. He has developed newly applied forms of aluminum, pigment, enamel, resin, polymer, and PVC to give unique effects to classic and organic forms. Nothing is quite as it seems.

“Past, Present, and Future,” the monumental wax and red oil-based paint sculpture that gives the exhibition its name, is half a dome-like form. It could as easily suggest a space station as an Eskimo’s igloo. The form is sleek, the execution primitive.

Kapoor manipulates form and perception of space explains Curator Nicholas Baume.
As a result, the viewer becomes involved and an active participant in the art. This is exactly what the sculptor intends. When he was in Boston recently to install the exhibition, he said that he doesn’t consider a work complete until someone is standing in front and looking at it. He wants viewers to be “intimately involved.”

“I’m interested in the way this stuff, which is very physical, has another reality,” Kapoor says. It’s not only the physicality of the art, however, but his choice of color that can be disorientating. When it’s a white work on a white wall like “Pregnanacy,” the viewer may find it difficult to distinguish the art from the architecture. By contrast, works in his “1000 Names” series achieve their effect with optical color vibrations like blue/purple.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a short documentary film, Anish Kapoor’s Poetic Laboratory, is continuously screened in an adjacent room. As he works in his studio, the artist, who is a “disciplined meditator,” discusses the wide-ranging and diverse sources of inspiration for his conceptual art, including the Kabbala, the book of Jewish mysticism.

Kapoor was born in 1954 in a suburb of Bombay, India, to an Iraqi-Jewish mother and a secular Hindu father. He had a Jewish upbringing and, after the Six Day War went to Israel, where he lived for a while. But he felt as much an outsider there as he had as the only non-Hindu at school in India. He left to travel around Europe, eventually settling in London where he studied art.

Now one of the leading sculptors in the world, he has received many prestigious awards, including The Turner Prize. The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art are among the international museums that have mounted solo shows of his work. “Cloud Gate,” a 110-ton, elliptical, mirror-faced sculpture, is the centerpiece of Chicago’s Millennium Park. And, last month, the British press announced that Kapoor has been commissioned to create the world’s largest outdoor sculpture in England.

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July 23 (Bloomberg) — Anish Kapoor, the India-born contemporary sculptor, will get a stand-alone exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in late 2009, RA Secretary and Chief Executive Charles Saumarez Smith said.
The show of Kapoor’s work, filling all of the main-floor galleries, will look back at the evolution of the Turner Prize- winner’s career, Saumarez Smith, who left the National Gallery’s directorship for the RA last year, said in an interview.
He also outlined architect David Chipperfield’s plans to renovate, by 2012, the academy’s Burlington Gardens annex: build a lecture theater, refurbish the upstairs gallery spaces, and open a ground-floor restaurant.
Saumarez Smith, 54, is steering an institution that for three decades was dominated by former Exhibitions Secretary Norman Rosenthal, mastermind of such blockbusters as this year’s “From Russia,” “Aztecs” (2002-3) and “Sensation” (1997). Rosenthal left in January to become a freelance curator; the RA exhibitions program for the next four years is mostly his doing. In the spring of 2009, the RA will show the work of the 19th- century Japanese printmaker Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
The new boss’s aim is to showcase the 240-year-old RA’s other constituents: the 80 artists, or academicians, who govern it, collectively displaying their work at the annual Summer Exhibition; and the art school, Britain’s oldest, where William Blake and J.M.W. Turner studied. He is glad that Kapoor and Chipperfield, both academicians, are in the RA spotlight.
`Cutting-Edge’
“In the past, there has been a very ambitious program for historic exhibitions, and also some famous, well-known, and memorable exhibitions of cutting-edge contemporary art,” said Saumarez Smith, dressed in a beige summer suit, as he dug into a plate of paella at a restaurant near the RA. “But in general, the RA has maybe not done as much as it might have done to promote the work of its members.
“I somewhat regret the fact that it’s thought of primarily only as an exhibition venue, and not as an institution which also represents the work of its members,” he said.
The RA’s next big show will be “Byzantium” (Oct. 25, 2008, through March 22, 2009), the first U.K. exhibition of its kind in 50 years. Spanning 11 centuries, it will display 300 objects loaned by, among others, Venice’s San Marco Treasury.
Saumarez Smith, who is busy securing loans for “Byzantium,” said he intended to keep the current mix of exhibitions that focus on art and civilization. More contemporary art shows, he said, would be staged in the Burlington Gardens wing, which Chipperfield is renovating.
Light Conservation
The architect was chosen from among seven for his philosophy of “light-touch conservation,” he said: “understanding the necessary balance between retaining the fabric and character of the existing building, but making it adventurous and interesting as an exhibition space.”
Chipperfield has recently worked on Berlin’s Neues Museum and on three U.S. institutions: the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa; the Anchorage Museum in Anchorage, Alaska; and the Saint Louis Art Museum in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Yet he has had few major commissions in the U.K. His current building projects are the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, and the Turner Contemporary in Margate.
Last week, the RA also named a new director of exhibitions: Kathleen Soriano, who managed exhibitions and collections at the National Portrait Gallery when Saumarez Smith ran it, and worked at the Royal Academy in the late 1980s. Currently director of the Compton Verney, an art gallery in Warwickshire, she studied, like Rosenthal, at the University of Leicester. She starts in January 2009.
Asked why he chose a less high-profile exhibitions manager than Rosenthal, Saumarez Smith said, “Norman had been exhibitions secretary for 31 years, and was extremely well known for that. Kathleen, I’m confident, will be well known possibly in a slightly different way.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Farah Nayeri in London at Farahn@bloomberg.net.

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Untitled is one of the largest of Kapoor’s alabaster works and the first double-concave piece to come to auction. Other significant prices were achieved included Subodh Gupta’s Untitled from 2005 for 201,25 pounds and Bharti Kher’s Misdemeanours which was sold for 75,650 pounds.

Gupta’s Untitled canvas, depicting a vessel stall glistening in the pink dawn of sunrise is one of the most important and powerful photo-realistic paintings of the artist to ever come to the market.

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SOTHEBY’S SALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART TO FEATURE EXCITING WORKS BY LEADING INDIAN CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS
INDIAN ARTISTS such as Subodh Gupta (b. 1964), Bharti Kher (b. 1969), Anish Kapoor (b. 1954), Raqib Shaw (b. 1974) and T.V. Santhosh (b. 1968) are an ever-growing force in Sotheby’s international sales of Contemporary Art – in addition to the company’s regular dedicated sales of Indian Art – and this summer’s major series of Contemporary Art sales in London will see this trend gather further momentum still. The sales on Tuesday, July 1 and Wednesday, July 2, 2008, will present a total of eight works by these cutting-edge and highly sought-after names and together the works are estimated in excess of £2 million. The sale will also include a work by Pakistan’s leading Contemporary artist, Rashid Rana.
James Sevier, a specialist in the Contemporary Art department, comments: “The group of works by Contemporary Indian artists being offered in our July sales is the largest group of its kind to be offered in our international Contemporary Art sales in London, indicating the growing international focus on this area of the market. Featuring recent paintings and sculptures by Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher and TV Santhosh – alongside important works by Raqib Shaw and Rashid Rana – the tightly curated assemblage reveals the broad variety of themes, materials and ideas that are flourishing within India’s Contemporary arts scene at the beginning of the 21st century. As the country’s traditional beliefs and rural way of life are confronted with the rapid pace of change exacerbated by the country’s urban transformation and the global media, the work of these artists explores the divisions and conflicts prevalent in Indian society today.
We have witnessed a huge growth in demand for works by Indian artists over the past 18 months; their work is increasingly being sought by Western and Indian collectors. This demand has seen new record price levels continually being achieved at auction. We expect the works on offer in July to follow recent trends, affirming the position of these artists as some of the most innovative and influential names on the international Contemporary Art auction market today.”
An Untitled sculpture from 2003 by Anish Kapoor leads the group in terms of value, with an estimate of £1-1.5 million. This stunning piece embodies the pioneering manipulation of space and material that characterizes the very best output of this world-renowned sculptor. One of the largest of the artist’s alabaster works and the first double-concave piece to come to auction, its sheer magnitude marks it apart as a sculptural phenomenon, evoking the grandeur of a feat of nature. Contrasting to the immensity of the marble, two beautiful hollows have been carved to mirror each other either side of the monolith, creating a spatial echo across a thin screen of alabaster. Thus, while the work’s scale is truly inspirational, addressing the viewer at eye-level and engaging total bodily experience, the colossus is also imbued with a serene weightlessness. It manifests dualities that have become synonymous with Kapoor’s seminal canon: presence versus absence; infinity versus illusion; and solidity versus intangibility.
An Untitled black Belgian granite sculpture by Kapoor will also be offered with an estimate of £400,000-600,000. Executed in 2002, the sculpture is a further sublime example of the artist’s ongoing sculptural enquiry into the relationships between form, material and space. Powerful in scale, the awe-inspiring physical presence and natural beauty of this rough-hewn monolith engages the viewer at eye level. It is one of only a handful of works that Kapoor has made on this scale in black Belgian granite. A third piece by Kapoor will be a lacquered bronze sculpture entitled After Marsyas. The title of this sculpture relates to Kapoor’s 2002 commission for the Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern entitled Marsyas. After Marsyas, estimated at £70,000-90,000, presents an experimental lens for contemplating the metaphysical polarities of human experience.
Subodh Gupta’s Untitled from 2005 is estimated at £200,000-300,000 and this work will see Gupta – who is arguably the most internationally recognised of all the Indian Contemporary artists – take the stage in a major Evening Sale of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s once again. The Untitled canvas depicts a vessel stall glistening in the pink dawn of sunrise and it is one of the artist’s most important and powerful photo-realist paintings to ever come to the market. The canvas captures the sense of promise and expectation that epitomises the mood of ambition and prosperity within India’s flourishing economy. The glistening pots and pans mark a stark contrast with the flatness of the soft pink background, creating a strong visual tension. The pots and pans are everyday icons of India’s complex and rapidly evolving contemporary identity; they are a staple of Indian homes both among the rural and urban echelons of society. Gupta utilises the stainless steel objects to inspire a commentary upon the prevailing social ills of discrimination, caste politics, industrialisation and religious tensions exacerbated by India’s urban transformation.
A second work by Gupta will be a highlight of the Contemporary Art Day Sale and this comprises a cast aluminium sculpture from an edition of three entitled Untitled (Across Seven Seas). This piece is estimated at £40,000-60,000.

New Delhi-based Bharti Kher is a trans-cultural Indian whose broad artistic language explores everyday concerns like identity, race, ethics and society and their continued dislocation within a global media age. Executed in fibreglass, wood and fur and estimated at £40,000-60,000, Misdemeanours from 2006 is one of Kher’s most iconic and powerful sculptures. It captures a snarling hyena whose hyper-real – almost hallucinatory form – typifies the dream-like characters inhabiting the surreal landscape of Kher’s imagination. It points towards the shattered harmony between man and nature in a modern society in which animals are increasingly confined to laboratories, zoos and tourism in their struggle for survival against the onset of urban expansion and a booming human population.
Raqib Shaw’s Chrysanthemum & Bee (after Kotsushika Hokusai) encapsulates the multiple layers – in terms of both style and subject matter – that typify the work of this artist. Shaw’s output can be defined as occupying a space between two artistic traditions; that of Kashmir in India (where he was born) and also London (where he now lives). Taking inspiration from the work of the great Japanese painter and printmaker Kotsushika Hokusai, Shaw applies a vibrant Kashmiri palette to the Japanese organic source motif, transforming the subdued, delicate hues of the original print into an explosion of iridescent colours. Motion in an otherwise static image comes from the bee that is, like the eye of the viewer, drawn to the flower. Shaw’s treatment of the chrysanthemum – considered in the Western world to be the symbol of death and mourning – is a masterstroke in the inverting of preconceived notions and truly embraces the Japanese interpretation of the flower as a symbol of regeneration. The panel was acquired directly from the artist by the seller in 2001 and is estimated at 80,000-120,000.
Further Day Sale highlights include TV Santosh’s oil on canvas from 2005, Man Made Famine and the Rats, estimated at £40,000-60,000 and a stunning work by Pakistan’s leading Contemporary artist Rashid Rana entitled Veil #6.
Since Rana’s first solo exhibition in 2004 with Peter Nagy’s Nature Morte Gallery, he has become one of the leading figures of Mumbai’s vibrant Contemporary Art scene. Rana is an artist who is best known for his photographs, videos and installations which tackle multiple issues such as politics of gender, violence and popular culture, as well as the authenticity of a work of art in the current media age of global distribution. Veil #6 belongs to Rana’s critically acclaimed series of works that drew their inspiration from the urban environment of his home city of Lahore. It depicts a found newspaper image of five veiled Muslim women at a protest rally against un-Islamic dress and brings together all of the artist’s concerns regarding gender, race, the media and popular culture with a single image. Added to this is the work’s underlying subversive content – namely the thousands of tiny pornographic images that describe the composite image in a pixelated x-rated mosaic. Rana’s photographic practice creates images that offer an alternative view of how popular ideas and prejudices are created.
* Pre-sale estimates do not include buyer’s premium
Sotheby’s holds the record for any Indian work of art sold at auction. This was set by Raqib Shaw’s Garden of Earthly Delights III , which sold for £2,708,500 (US$5,491,755) in London in October 2007.
The works will be on view at Sotheby’s, New Bond Street, London on:
Saturday 28 June 12noon – 5 pm
Sunday 29 June 12 noon – 5 pm
Monday 30 June 9 am – 7 pm
Tuesday 1 July 9 am – 12 noon

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