By Uma Nair, IANS
Mumbai : As many as 115 works by 43 Indian artists will feature in the Saffronart autumn online auction of contemporary Indian art works that will take place Sep 5-6.
This auction is the eighteenth in the series by Saffronart – exclusively on www.saffronart.com.
On the cover of the catalogue is Atul Dodiya’s “Chikoo Drawing”. Signed and dated in English (verso) 1989, this oil on canvas is estimated at Rs.6 million-8 million ($150,000-200,000).
This work captures a young boy drawing on the wall with chalk. Though his current work is often three-dimensional, Dodiya was initially fascinated by the idea of confining the three-dimensional to the two dimensions of his canvas. It was in this context that the artist spent much of the late 1980s painting monumental portraits of the quiet, middle-class ambience in which he grew up.
On the back cover is the work of Delhi’s Damien Hirst. Subodh Gupta’s 2004 oil on canvas is an untitled work estimated at Rs.4 million-5 million.
Drawing mainly from everyday objects and scenarios, Gupta blends the complex inter-relations of India’s urban and rural communities. His work that symbolises the traveller at the airport shows the effects of consumerism and modernisation.
His second work, estimates at the same price as the first, takes a swipe at capitalism’s materialist ethic. In his exploration of globalisation and its effect on the emergence of a new Indian middle-class, Gupta’s main concerns have been the ideas of subjective value, material production and consumption.
In charting India’s unique developmental path, the artist creatively draws attention to the present co-existence of tradition and modernity in India, and the distinct social realities that emerge from that interface. In doing so, Gupta effectively demonstrates the impossibility of capturing the intricacies of the developing world through a developed-world-lens.
A number of younger names also figure in the auction list – the most exciting being Kishore Shinde whose 2006 oil on canvas is priced at Rs.1.25 million-1.75 million.
Shinde is exciting because he merges the elements of abstraction with the blend of a reduction towards essence and absence with an acute sense of the ephemeral.
Then there is young Yashwant Deshmukh who uses minimalist elements to express childhood recollections and reflections. But he melds visual patterns and ambience to give an atmosphere that is lucid and succinct. Both of Yahswant’s works “Every Moment is Different” and an untitled work are priced between Rs.375,000 and Rs.475,000.
Pooja Iranna’s work also comes as a welcome inclusion. Her 2006 work “Standing Strong II” is a watercolour on free acid paper estimated between Rs.200,000 and Rs.250,000. Her second work is a digital print and sand on board estimated at Rs.150,000-200,000.
The structure of the Saffronart online auction and its time span allows serious collectors as well as first-time buyers worldwide to place their bids over a period of two days, as opposed to a period of a few hours in a live auction.