PATNA: Leading contemporary artist Subodh Gupta is, what they say, paying back to his home state Bihar which saw the worst-ever floods last monsoon. He collaborated with his celebrity friends in the art world, and collected Rs 4.17 crore through online auction of their paintings for rehabilitation of the state’s flood victims.

Gupta is among few Indian artists who have made meteoric rise during the past few years. One of his paintings sold at a whopping Rs 4.28 crore at a recent art auction at Gurgaon, where bidders from 32 countries competed with one another for 100-odd works of art by Indian contemporaries.

“We persuaded 30 leading Indian contemporary artists to donate their works for the flood-relief auction,” Gupta and his wife, Bharti, informed TOI in an e-mail. Saffronart, Peter Nagi of Nature Morte Gallery and Trident Hotel at Gurgaon collaborated in the project. The auction was hosted by Saffronart on its online platform on November 11 and 12.

Gupta and his friends have selected two Bihar-based NGOs __ Gunj and Samajik Saikshanik Vikas Kendra (SSVK) — to spend the money in the flood-hit areas. “We have already disbursed Rs 50 lakh to Gunj and Rs 34 lakh to SSVK,” Gupta said.

In response to a query, Gupta, a native of Khagaul near Patna, said he often thought about the plight of flood-hit people when mercury dips. “That’s how the idea of a charity auction struck me,” he said.

More than three million people were rendered homeless by the floods as the mighty Kosi river changed its course following a breach in its embankment at Kusaha in Nepal on August 18, 2008.

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MUMBAI: The victims of the flood in Bihar in August have found good Samaritans in 31 artists from across the country. From Atul and Anju Dodiya and Jitish Kallat to T V Santhosh and Mithu Sen, artists have donated one work each to an auction organised by Saffron Art, artist couple Subodh Gupta and Bharti Kher, Delhi gallery Nature Morte and the Trident in Gurgaon. Hundred per cent of the proceeds will go to NGOs that work with victims of the flood, said Saffron Art owner Dinesh Vazirani. The works will be auctioned on November 11 and 12 and those interested can visit www.saffronart.com.

The event has been put together in a lightning 20 days. Kher said that she and Gupta urgently called their friends as the condition of the flood victims is quite grim and getting worse. Stories about the global economic meltdown have eclipsed press coverage of flood relief, Vazirani pointed out. Now they have absolutely nothing, said Kher. Its the right time to do an auction. Riyas Komu, one of the contributors, added that Kher and Gupta are doing a worthy thing and that its high time the government tackles natural calamities better. It was an anticipated flood and there had been several warnings.

The even is especially significant for Gupta as he is a native of Bihar. Initially Gupta and Kher had the mad idea that they would go to Bihar themselves to see how they could help. Gupta joked that if he had carried out his plan, he wouldnt have been able to work for at least a year. Two NGOs Goonj and Samajik Shaikshanik Vikas Kendrawill disburse the funds generated by the auction. Vazirani said that a conservative estimate of the target he thinks the auction will achieve is Rs three crore. The upper estimate, he added, is Rs four crore.

The works on display are quite stunning. Bose Krishnamachari, for instance, has served up a psychadelic piece of art titled Stretched Bodies. Delhi-based duo Thukral and Tagra have offered Somnium Genero, a triptych that involves pop art colours, old-fashioned frames and a toaster. In Bharti Khers work, This Way and Never Another Way, tributaries of red, blue, black and white bindis form what looks like a mighty river. The artists have really given great works, Vazirani said. And theyre well-priced. Are the organisers worried that collectors might shy away from spending on art at a time when the global economy is in a deep trough? Gupta explains that he doesnt expect buyers to be chary as theyre not donating money. Even though theyre spending considerable amounts, theyre getting something highly valuable in return, he said. The artists, on the other hand, have donated their paintings without asking for a penny. This is a coming together of artists from India, said Vaziranis wife Minal. Theres a sense of a community. Were able to contribute to the survival of people.

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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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The ‘stunning’ piece, which soared above its pre-sale estimate of £1-1.5 million, “embodies the pioneering manipulation of space and material that characterises the very best output of this world-renowned sculptor.” The untitled sculpture is one of Kapoor’s largest alabaster works and the first double-concave piece to come to auction.

Among other Indian works, Subodh Gupta’s untitled work, created in 2005, catapulted above its pre-sale estimate of £2,00,000-3,00,000, selling for £6,01,250. The untitled canvas, depicting a vessel stall glistening in the pink dawn of sunrise, is one of Gupta’s most important and powerful photo-realist paintings to ever come to the market.

Bharti Kher made her debut appearance at the Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Contemporary Art. Her sculpture, ‘Misdemeanours’, executed in fibreglass, wood and fur, saw bidding from six bidders and finally realised £75,650, against an estimate of £40,000-60,000.

The sale, overall, achieved a phenomenal sum of £94.702 million ($188.854 million) against a pre-sale estimate of £67.4-96.6 million making it the most successful summer sale of contemporary art in Europe. The sale had numerous high points, with records achieved by 11 different artists.

Cheyenne Westphal, chairman of contemporary art, Sotheby’s Europe and Oliver Barker, senior international specialist, Sotheby’s contemporary art department, told ET in an email from London: “We are elated with the results of the sale, the highest ever Summer sale of contemporary art in Europe. We saw 11 records tumble, including ones for Antony Gormley, Bridget Riley, Richard Prince and Anish Kapoor, in front of a hugely energetic and packed saleroom.”

“The top lot of the sale was Francis Bacon’s exquisite small-scale study for head of George Dyer, which sold for £13.7 million. We are also extremely happy with the result achieved for the group of twelve works from the Lauffs Collection, which achieved a total of £18.9 million, almost triple the pre-sale low estimate of £6.4 million. Once again, we are witnesses to a market that is driven by art lovers. Buyers have confidence in the artworks they are competing for, and have shown unprecedented determination to win the lots which they desire.”

Incidentally, the portrait of John McEnroe and Tatum O’Neal by Andy Warhol, depicting McEnroe and O’Neal in their mid-1980s prime, sold for £241,250. Gifted by McEnroe himself, the proceeds will be donated by the tennis star for the benefit of habitat for humanity, which provides not-for-profit housing through the help of volunteers.

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Photos: Shailendra Pandey
pinned to the wall. Three assistants are pressing hundreds of custom-made bindis onto paintings with meditative calm. Not far away, in her husband Subodh Gupta’s studio there is a signature utensil sculpture. Giant tiffin boxes (as appear in his work Silk Route, 2007) stand like soldiers in one corner. There’s a tower of copper pots on the staircase extending like a beanstalk into another world. A gas mask. Two huge paintings. The rooms gleam with a matter of fact industriousness.
Bharti is much as people have told me she would be. Tough and smart and worldly, if the word used to describe Subodh is playful, the one for her is ‘power’. She knows exactly what she wants, and it’s easy to see how her no bullshit attitude gets her far in uptight Delhi. The two are among the most important artists in India today. Crucially, they have jumped the ghettoised category of the ‘Indian artist’ and are represented by top galleries around the world. Reputedly savvy networkers, they are happily receptive to the kind of attention their work now commands. They love parties and people and good food. Even in shorts and chappals, they exude the impossible glamour of what, on the surface, appears to be a meteoric rise to fame.
Gupta’s art is steeped in the totems of rural India: the cow dung patty, the milk pail, the bicycle — that for all their banality resonate with an almost dangerous power. In globalising India such images both celebrate and subvert the sentimental nostalgia they evoke. His village Bihari persona places him in an authentic space, offering experience he plumbs with unique humour and knowingness. And yet the surety with which the images are transformed into an international language points to a sensibility that is well attuned to global trends and appetites. And it is the ease with which Gupta himself navigates the seemingly contradictory spaces of Patna and the Palazzo Grassi that points to his particular success. When village India goes global with such sophistication, something obvious and yet of great interest is afoot.
Born in Bihar, Subodh is the youngest of six children. His brothers and father were all railway men. “Apart from food and the school we didn’t have anything. So I was thinking, how can I run from here?” When it came to choose between arts and sciences in school he chose science despite being a poor student because in the science classes there were lots of figures and diagrams. He loved to draw. Through his mother he developed a great love of theatre. He went to art school but to do commercial art, not fine art, “because I wanted to make money.” For two years he worked for the Navbharat Times as a graphic artist. “The day they wanted to make me permanent, I resigned. I don’t want to be permanent anything.” While at art school, theatre remained as a second passion. “The best thing that happened in my life was that I learned to act. When you can act like someone else you feel like you are god. But at some point I had to make a choice between theatre and fine art.” It’s easy to see theatrical influence in his work: the use of symbolism, the dramatic potential of a stark set piece, the intriguing joining of language and image.
Gupta is an artist of the charismatic, rather than reticent, school. Addicted to making work, he exudes a vital creative energy. Deeply ambitious and convinced by his own talent, he’s sui generis. While still in college at Patna University, he heard about Russi Mody’s patronage of the arts. With characteristic chutzpah he sought out the TATA Steel Chairman to have him sponsor and inaugurate his final year show. “He gave me some money to hang my show, and a date for three months later, six o’ clock at this club in Jamshedpur. He came at the promised date, five minutes late and said, ‘I’m sorry I’m little late’. And he bought four works.” He likes the work of artist provocateurs like Maurizio Cattelan, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, yet his assistant says he’d prefer not to have the heatedly sensual photograph Vilas, 1999 (where he appears nude and covered in Vaseline) run with this story. On account of his kids. He used to be critical of MF Husain’s work. “We deserve something more from him. He makes very easy art, what sells in the market, yet he changed the face of contemporary art. My opinion of him has changed in the last fifteen years; I have a huge regard for him now.”
Like Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Steiglitz, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Bharti and Subodh as an artist couple have come to represent a particular moment in a nation’s creative history. Their careers are set to varying degrees of red hot. They are now in many of the world’s major private collections. On one hand there is the almost corporate power of their artist brand, and on the other, the human scale of Bharti and Subodh. On visits to their studios in Gurgaon, both sides are on display. There are the many people in their employ, required to create and sustain projects of such magnitude. There is the reality of vitamins and kid’s birthday parties. There are the artworks destined for exalted venues. And the conversations with suppliers and manufacturers that make the pieces happen. And as unpretentious as the two may be, it’s difficult to forget that the sculpture covered in bubblewrap in the corner may soon be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. As crass as it is to talk of price, expensive things do carry with them a certain aura.
Raised in Surrey by Indian parents who ran a textile business, Bharti’s first solo show in the UK, Virus is currently on at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle the desolate town where she studied painting in the late 80s (Last summer Subodh had a solo show there). “It was a hostile place and I just withdrew into myself.” She likes natural history museums and curiosities and medieval Christian art. And she is attracted to very traditional ways of making. “I like objects: sculptures, paintings. As opposed to even a photograph or video. It’s important to me that my pieces are made by hand, that they be touched, that everything be different.
The value of the piece is the value of time, of your own life in that you’ve given a part of your day.”
Shortly after graduation and to escape London (“I felt I had nothing to say”), she came to Delhi, met Subodh and fell in love in a then unusual story of reverse migration. In the early days they didn’t share a language. “She didn’t speak Hindi and I didn’t speak English. Only love! No need to understand! Expression is enough,” says Subodh laughing. They stayed in Delhi, because as Bharti puts it, “What the hell would he do in England? I’d have to go and get a job to look after him so he could make art and I’d work nine to five. I didn’t think so.” In India they could both do nothing. They were poor and they made art. “From the day I arrived, a year later I had a solo show at AIFACS. A terrible show, but at least I did it,” she says.
SUBODH HAD arrived in Delhi in 1988 after college, and spent his first year at the Lalit Kala Akademi guest house despite a rule that usually limited a stay to five days. At the time the Akademi was a vital stop for artists from small towns newly arrived to the capital. After he met Bharti in 1992, they moved around Delhi, always searching for more space and helped found the seminal experimental artists’ collective, Khoj, along the way. At the time, there was almost no art scene in Delhi. “We once did a commission for a beer company, about 75 or a 100 works and we did it for so cheap, just shamelessly undercut everyone. We lived on very little then. We had no expenses. Our rent was Rs 1,400 a month. And that was a lot,” says Bharti.
“But even when Subodh started his career with Gallery Espace in 1992, he was selling paintings, for 20,000- 40,000 which was a lot back then,” she says. “One day I said, Subodh you make really shit paintings. Some of them were actually really good. He would make one, then another. The gallery would say, we want the same painting. In blue. When you start doing that you’re on the road to ruin.” So Subodh changed his work and they didn’t make any money for a while.
“Bharti told me I was making bad art, and I really wanted to be a good artist. Between ‘93 and ‘95 I made really bad art, because I wanted to change my art, and it’s not easy. I didn’t have money. Bharti had come from a wealthy family, from abroad. I had to prove myself. I had to have a cooler. And I had to make art.” Funnily enough, it was the setting aside of monetary goals that saw the sea change. “At Khoj we said, let’s make art for art’s sake. Not for sale. And it helped me express myself as an artist. I made one of my major works at that time, My Mother and Me (a house made of dung cakes), and I did my first performance (in 1999) there as well.”
The first sculptural installation Subodh did was in 1996 on an Indo-Australian residency at the Sanskriti Kendra. The piece, 29 Mornings (now in the collection of the Fukuoka Museum of Art), signalled some kind of beginning. “After that I didn’t turn back. For any scholarship that I submitted that image, I would get selected.” As for the glimmering steel utensil sculptures that have become his trademark, how did that come about? “I’ll tell you my secret: I asked myself what are people attracted to. They like shining things. Polished things. What is polished but also so natural and domestic and also full of meaning? Why not use it in your artwork. Why not do that? And I did it.”
Bharti’s work, like Subodh’s suggests a particular fascination with the mass produced object that has been somehow altered, made personal and imbued with meaning. Her work is decidedly more sinister than his. Her show at the Baltic includes fibre glass trees with little gargoyle heads in place of leaves, part of the Solarum Series. An earlier work, Hirsute, was a catalogue of leering male moustaches. Her current work layers bindis on panels and giant animal sculptures. There’s a concern with the domestic just as there’s a fascination with the natural world, with unseen and unheard rhythms, grasped moments between shifting states. Much of the imagery resounds from her student days. “You have a certain library of images in your mind, and you work with it and push it in different directions,” she says.
One of her most impressive works, An Absence of Assignable Cause (now in the Saatchi collection) saw her cast a blue whale heart in steel. When a whale dies its internal organs combust in 3-5 hours, so it’s nearly impossible to find images of what it looks like. “I was writing to people around the world saying, can you help me, I’m a research student. That didn’t work. Then I said my son is doing a school project. That actually worked a lot better. And the ones where I said I was an artist, I got no responses at all.”
The couple’s work has sometimes been described pejoratively as decorative, as if art did not begin as the creation of visually exalted things. “Part of me would love to be a conceptual artist. There is a lot of courage to be able to do something so clean and so simple. There’s a side of me that wants to reduce, reduce, reduce to the bare minimum,” says Kher. “We’re so used to such a plethora of images and objects, sometimes it’s overkill. You have to find something that works conceptually, and aesthetically with your own process.” Subodh also acknowledges this supposed lack. “For good art, you have to be either very intellectual to make conceptual art, or visually strong. I was not good at studies, so I couldn’t be a conceptual artist. You have to be able to explain why you’re placing this empty cup, and I can’t explain it. Better I just make some art and you look at it and be happy,” says Subodh. But their success has been accompanied by some grumbling. ‘They have so many commissions that for the next few years they will be making old work,’ people say. That they are increasingly obsessed with scale and making huge pieces. That the work that has made them famous is not actually their most interesting work. These are complaints that exist, but the problems themselves perhaps do not.
TODAY THEY are each other’s first critics though that is also changing. “We know each other extremely well, how the work has developed, where the images come from, so we don’t have to discuss what the work is, just say if the piece is a success,” says Bharti. They stopped sharing a studio about four years ago. He loves to cook. After trips she brings home a suitcase full of books and he a suitcase full of ingredients. She often titles his works. They both hate Gurgaon, where they live and work. Kher calls it “bourgeois hell”.
“I think we’ve worked extremely hard to keep our practices quite different. We are both very different people. In the way we work. Our nature. He’s very outgoing. He can’t live without people. I like to be on my own. Subodh doesn’t read at all. He’s very intuitive about people, I’m not. I always get people wrong. I am more intuitive about the future. He doesn’t think about the future. He lives for today. Sometimes, we are quite opposite. But we both make art, and we like each other’s work, and respect each other’s practice,” she says.
They are sanguine about the pressures of a global art career. “We’ve been working to get here for fifteen years and now that you’re here you can’t say, I’m sorry, I’m tired,” says Bharti. But they are busy. More deadlines. More shows. They often don’t make it to each other’s openings abroad. Their two kids (12 and 4) travel with them often, usually about a third of the year. Now they also have choices. “We’re lucky, Indian artists today,” says Bharti. “People are interested in us. It’s our time — we have to make the most of it.” •

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AMIT ROY

Subodh Gupta’s untitled canvas and (above) Raqib Shaw’s Chrysanthemum & Bee, to be auctioned at Sotheby’s
London, June 25: India in transition appears to be the theme of works by contemporary Indian artists, especially Subodh Gupta from Bihar, which are due to be sold at auction at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s in London.
On Tuesday and Wednesday next week, Sotheby’s is offering eight works by “the cutting-edge and highly sought-after names of Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Anish Kapoor, Raqib Shaw and T.V. Santhosh”.
This will be preceded by an auction on Monday at Christie’s, featuring works by Subodh Gupta, Anish Kapoor and Syed Haider Raza.
It seems the world’s two premier auction houses are almost competing for the best of contemporary Indian art but, collectively, their sales in London and New York have driven up prices so that million-pound-plus figures are no longer rare.
At Sotheby’s, Calcutta-born and London-educated Raqib Shaw’s Chrysanthemum & Bee (“an explosion of iridescent colours, with a rich gold border”), inspired by the Japanese painter and printmaker Kotsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), has a reserve price of £80,000-120,000 (Rs 68 lakh to Rs 1.02 crore).
The auction house has proudly pointed out: “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 (Rs 22.7 crore) in London in October 2007.”
Sotheby’s says “Indian artists are an ever-growing force in Sotheby’s international sales of contemporary art” and that this summer’s sales in London “will see this trend gather further momentum still”.
At Sotheby’s, Subodh Gupta’s untitled canvas from 2005, estimated at £200,000-300,000, depicts “a vessel stall glistening in the pink dawn of sunrise”.
Over at Christie’s, Subodh Gupta’s Dubai to Calcutta, bronze and aluminium, in three parts, has a reserve price of £150,000-200,000.
“Dubai to Calcutta is one of an important series of works known as Across Seven Seas made in 2006,” states an explanatory note from Christie’s.
“Consisting of a series of aluminium and bronze cast replicas of the kind of luggage that millions of Indian migrant workers bring back to India on trolleys as the materialistic fruit of their labour in other lands, these works are commemorative statues of a widespread contemporary economic phenomenon particularly relevant to Subodh Gupta’s home state of Bihar.”
It adds: “The impoverished Indian state of Bihar has been providing a large percentage of India’s large population of migrant workers for over a hundred years.”
It goes on: “Serving as a kind of opposite to Gupta’s sculptures of commonplace pots and pans, these luxuriously rendered baggage trolleys represent the extraordinary, but in fact also pitiful, material objects from the outside world so proudly brought back into the country by migrant workers, in the same way that the kitchen utensils seem to symbolise the disappearing culture of home.”
This insightful observation also applies to Anish Kapoor, who came to London from Mumbai, while Raza settled in Paris (he received a Padma Bhushan last year).
At Sotheby’s, Kapoor’s untitled sculpture from 2003, which features hollows scooped from alabaster, has an estimate of £1-1.5 million.
At Christie’s, there are three of the sculptor’s works on sale, with the most expensive, featuring a polished purple mirror, given a reserve price of £600,000-800,000.
Kapoor has always striven not to be narrowly classified as “Indian” or “ethnic”, though today claiming he is really the son of Mother India may add to his lustre.
Raza’s La Terre, acrylic on canvas, is estimated to fetch £1,000,000-1,500,000 by Christie’s, which says: “Rooted in Raza’s childhood memories of life growing up in the small and densely forested village of Kakaiya near the Narmada River valley in Madhya Pradesh, the painting is an evocative expression of the rich density and strong sensory life inherent with the deep, warm, blackness of the Indian night.”
Raza, who has lived in France, has given a quote on what has driven him: “I have never left India. I love my country and I am proud of it. I have been linked with the profound spiritual, religious message that India has to give to Indians and to the world of which we are forgetful at times, even in India.”

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