Bid online to buy Hussein's Gaitonde

Or, you can spend Rs 70.5-94 lakh for a Subodh Gupta work, Rs 70-80 lakh for a Maqbool Fida Hussein creation or Rs 45-55 lakh for an Akbar Padamsee’s art.

And you have time till Friday midnight, as 85 works of art by 57 contemporary Indian artists are being auctioned online right now by art auction house Saffronart with the target of raising between Rs 11 crore and Rs 13.9 crore.

The other prominent names whose work are being auctioned are Ram Kumar, Arpita Singh, Jogen Chowdhury, Hema Upadhyay, Anju Dodiya and Riyas Komu.

The annual summer online auction by Saffronart, according to those involved with the process, is aimed at both seasoned art collectors as well as first-time buyers, and the work on offer have been carefully selected and competitively priced. “Saffronart has always been keen on making important works of highly prized Indian artists available to collectors around the world. Today, collectors have become very selective. Keeping this in mind, we have carefully edited this sale, and are committed to presenting extraordinary works at competitive prices,” says Saffronart CEO Dinesh Vazirani. “This auction promises to entice new collectors with a number of historically and aesthetically significant works by recognised modernists and younger, contemporary artists,” he says.

The catalogue accompanying the auction has on its front cover an important 1984 canvas by Gaitonde, one of India ’s foremost modern painters who is remembered for the independence, fastidiousness and minimalism of his creative process. 

Another significant work on offer is Padamsee’s untitled canvas from his ‘Metascape’ series, which Padamsee described as elemental microcosms of the universe and its basic constituents that transcend the convolutions of existence as we know and experience it. The sale further includes an untitled 2006 canvas by Subodh Gupta, where the artist juxtaposes the polished with the tarnished, the new with the old, bringing into focus the dualistic quality of stainless steel, and, by extension, the dualities of life in India following the economic liberalization in the 1990s.

Also featuring in the auction is contemporary artist Hema Upadhyay’s landmark mixed-media work on paper, “Bleeding Hearts”, which combines personal with the political, raising issues of loss, disenchantment and dislocation in modern urban life and, more generally, questions of security and survival in today’s violent and turbulent world.
DH News Service