JOIN USBack in the game
This year’s edition of the India Art Fair was an expansive affair at the NSIC exhibition grounds in New Delhi, with 85 exhibitors, including 71 galleries and 14 institutions. The art buzz in the capital was unmistakable, with several collateral events, gallery exhibitions, auction previews, talks, performances and guided walks ongoing either in parallel with the fair, in conjunction with it or organised as part of IAF activities. In its 14th year, the India art fair has clearly evolved as a significant event in the region and has grown substantially in scale too, since its initial outings at Pragati Maidan.
Although this edition comes less than a year from the scaled-down version held at the start of summer 2022, the post-pandemic syndrome has contributed vastly to its success, especially in terms of footfalls. The fair offered ample opportunities to meet the art fraternity and to view and engage with a diverse range of contemporary art from across the country.
On the commercial front, which is the primary focus of any art fair, sales have been buoyant according to IAF reports, with several galleries doing brisk business. For instance, Galleria Continua, one of the few galleries from outside India, reported sales by Anish Kapoor, Subodh Gupta, Nikhil Chopra, Shilpa Gupta, Loris Cecchini, Kiki Smith, Alejandro Campins and Osvaldo González within a price range of USD 5,000 to nearly USD 900,000, with an average price of USD 20,000 to USD 30,000. This is approximately Rs 7.5 crore at the upper end for a single artwork, a sure sign that collectors are back in the market and looking at the right pieces for their collection.
Focus on upcoming artists
Incidentally, over the years, the fair has focused on a Young Collectors Programme, which aims to bring in new collectors and facilitate their first purchases. This edition saw several upcoming artists’ works on display at attractive price points, which one assumes would have been a good draw.
The Kolkata Centre for Creativity as the inclusivity partner for the fair presented a collection of tactile artworks and a braille book based on artist S G Vasudev’s drawings.
This year’s facade for the fair was designed by Warli artists and sibling duo Vayeda Brothers, and it was heartening to see folk and vernacular arts represented in various forms at the fair. One of the sections at the fair showcased works by three important artists Jangrah Singh Shyam, Baua Devi and Bhuri Devi.
It was also interesting to see the sheer number of works that were textile or fibre/threads based. To name just a few, T Venkanna with embroidered fantastical landscapes, Gurjeet Singh with his playful and quirky soft sculptures, Manisha Gera Baswani’s intricate chikankari on cloth, Nidhi Agarwal’s fabric collages and Viraj Khanna’s elaborate sculptural installation made with hand embroidery on textile with acrylic on fibreglass, made a splash.
Some of the works that stood out at the fair for me, were Loris Cecchini’s µGraph reliefs (dark orange 173C), 2019, made of polyurethane, epoxy resins and nylon fibres on aluminium, at Galleria Continua. Anish Kapoor’s ‘Garnet to Apple Red mix 2 to Pagan Gold/Spanish Gold’, a sculpture with a highly reflective surface, the kind he is known for, was a huge attraction at the venue. It is a fascinating combination of spatial illusion, depth and colour with subtle variations evident with change in vantage point.
In addition, Jayashree Chakravarty at Akar Prakar with her large work ‘Alien Sphere’, a set of nine sheets composed of primarily organic materials on paper formed a cave-like structure which one could walk in and experience the artwork from within as well. Antonio Santin, the New York-based Spanish artist at Galerie Isa returned to the fair with his ‘carpet’ painting — a three-dimensional hyper-realistic work in oil paint that recreates vintage and antique carpets, and makes you wonder what objects and secrets lie within and beneath its folds.
Apart from the art at the fair, the two exhibitions organised by the Gujral Foundation and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art that I visited, deserve a mention. The Bengaluru-based artist KK Raghava, who has been increasingly integrating Artificial Intelligence and digital tools in his practice, to explore transcendence as a leitmotif, presented his solo exhibition ‘The Impossible Bouquet at Jor Bagh’, New Delhi. Curated by Firoze Gujral, the exhibition is a unique collaboration between the artist and AI, where it plays with the image of the bouquet as a transient composition. In the series, the strange and absurd, through assorted objects and materials, amalgamate to create still-life bouquets that question notions of aesthetics, beauty, vulnerability and materiality.
Dab Hand is your art world lowdown.
The author is a Bengaluru-based art consultant, curator and writer. She blogs at Art Scene India and can be reached on artsceneinfo@gmail.com