Amrita Sher-Gil's Ladies' Enclosure set a new auction record

Source The Mint by Avantika Bhuyan
A rare Amrita Sher-Gil painting from her India period, painted just three years before her death, fetched ₹37.8 crore (US$ 5.14 million) at a Mumbai auction on Tuesday, making it the second-most expensive artwork by an Indian artist globally. The record-breaking sale of Sher-Gil’s seminal painting clearly indicates her artistic merit, said Dinesh Vazirani, chief executive and co-founder of Saffronart, which auctioned her painting. “The work highlights her growth and development as an artist and is a culmination of years of coming into her own as an artist of repute. It is, additionally, a rare work of the artist from that particular period to emerge in the art market, and we are honoured to have played a part in creating a new benchmark with this auction," Vazirani said. The Indo-Hungarian artist blended European and Indian styles in her work and captured the lives and experiences of women in early 20th century India. “Her paintings are lauded for their timeless themes and qualities that powerfully resonate with women’s narratives even today," notes a blog post on Saffronart, published on 8 July.
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Shilpa Gupta and the art of infiltration

Source Architectural Digest by Anindita Ghose
Gupta’s works bore deep but there is a surface-level accessibility to them as well. “In terms of people receiving the work, it’s like keeping the door slightly ajar to start a possible conversation. Can there exist something only to trigger an emotion or a thought?” she asks. Her pundit-meets-punk aesthetic has spanned Advaita philosophy to guerilla performances where not just soap bars but white balloons with messages scrawled across may be handed to exhibition visitors and passersby who carry it into other worlds with them. For even where people cannot go, Gupta knows that art can infiltrate.
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