CONTEMPORARY ONE WORD SEVERAL WORLDS

vendredi 30 novembre 2018

Tyeb Mehta's "Durga" fetches Rs 20 cr at Sotheby's auction

Source Business Standard
Tyeb Mehta's painting "Durga Mahisasura Mardini" was sold for USD 2.9 million (Rs 20.49 crore) at Boundless India, Sotheby's inaugural auction in Mumbai, Thursday evening. Art works worth USD 7.9 million (Rs 55.40 crore) were sold at the auction, a Sotheby's official said, adding over 75 per cent of sold lots achieved prices above their pre-sale high estimates. Mehta's painting had remained in the same private collection ever since it was commissioned directly from the artist in 1993. Strong competition for Amrita Sher-Gil's "The Little Girl in Blue" led the painting to sell over the high estimate for Rs 18.69 crore (USD 2.7 million), a record price for the artist in India. This is only the seventh oil painting by the artist to be offered anywhere in the world. The work had remained in the same collection for 80 years, since it was selected by Sher-Gil for her first solo show in 1937.
> read more

Amrita Sher-Gil, Known as ‘India’s Frida Kahlo,’ Is a Standout at Sotheby’s Inaugural Auction in Mumbai


Source Artnet News by Sarah Cascone
A rare work by Hungarian-Indian artist Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941), who was nicknamed the “Indian Frida Kahlo,” was among the top sellers at “Boundless: Mumbai,” the inaugural sale for Sotheby’s India, held today in Mumbai. Her piece, The Little Girl in Blue (1934), went for 18,68,75,000 INR ($2.54 million), well above its presale high estimate. Previously, only two oil paintings by Sher-Gil had ever been auctioned in India, and only six worldwide. The sales totals for the night were 56,08,00,000 INR ($7.9 million)—roughly matching expectations—with 11 lots failing to sell. The move into the Indian market is not without risk for Sotheby’s. The country’s economy and art market appears to be growing, but the same was true ahead of 2008’s recession, and optimism in the region is understandably mixed with caution after the once-booming market cratered a decade ago. Christie’s stopped its annual live auctions in Mumbai last year.
> read more

jeudi 29 novembre 2018

Tyeb Mehta and Amrita Sher-Gil to lead Sotheby's first auction in India


Source The Telegraph by Smita Tripathi
On November 29, at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, as the clock strikes seven, 60 lots will go under the hammer at Sotheby's first ever auction in Mumbai, called 'Boundless: India'. This landmark auction will make Mumbai Sotheby's 10th sale location globally. The pieces featured in the auction, as the title suggests, transcend time and geography. Says Yamini Mehta, International Head of Modern and Contemporary South Asian Art at Sotheby’s,"The idea of not having categorisation in the works and by calling the sale 'Boundless' means that we can look at works not just by Indian artists but also works that are inspired by India." So there are architectural drawings of IIM Ahmedabad by Louis Kahn, mid-20th century furniture by Pierre Jeanneret, a 1948 photograph of Srinagar by Henri Cartier-Bresson among the lots.
> read more

mardi 27 novembre 2018

Jangarh Singh Shyam New Book

lundi 26 novembre 2018

Collateral exhibition at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018


Source MAP
Following a year-long conservation project of its eighteenth-century Dutch warehouse in Fort Kochi, MAP is proud to offer this space once again as a venue for the forthcoming Kochi-Muziris Biennale. As a separate collateral exhibition during the Biennale, MAP has also invited the French artist Georges Rousse and Greek designer Nassia Inglessis to create installations throughout the first floor of the venue which will be on display for the duration of the Biennale.

Jangarh Singh Shyam book launch


Source MAP
Jangarh Singh Shyam: A Conjuror's Archive, authored by Dr. Jyotindra Jain and published by MAP will be released this December. The book is an in depth and critical introduction into the work of India’s seminal ‘tribal’ artist, exploring both his context and legacy. It also examines the events surrounding his tragic suicide in Japan in 2001, with previously unpublished letters from Jangarh to his family in the weeks leading up to his demise. To coincide with its release, MAP is working with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi where over forty five of Jangarh’s paintings and drawings from MAP's collections will be on display, as part of an exhibition curated by Dr. Jyotindra Jain and Roobina Karode.

Emami Group to start 70,000 sq ft interactive art facility in Kolkata


Source Money Control
Adding its creative touch to the culture capital of the country, Emami Group is all set to throw open the doors of a 70,000 square foot space called The Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC) this November. To be inaugurated on November 21, KCC would be the first multi-dimensional interactive art centre for modern and contemporary Indian art in the eastern part of India. “KCC will also house, Emami Art Gallery space with a regular programme of exhibitions by artists of national and international repute. We would have a different programme every month for artists. The first year Emami art will host the first ever solo exhibition of Late Dashrath Patel, followed by exhibitions of Bose Krishnamachari, Ravinder Reddy and Jogen Chowdhury,” said Richa Agarwal, executive director, KCC and CEO at Emami Art.
> read more

Delhi-based artist wins Emerging Artist Award, Swiss residency


Source Business Standard
Delhi-based artist Anupam Roy, whose "large-scale drawings and paintings speak about systemic violence and injustice", has bagged the Emerging Artist Award 2018 granted by the non-profit Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA). Given annually in collaboration with Pro Helvetia (Swiss Arts Council), the award seeks to promote young artists who are studying or practising in India, and demonstrate extraordinary skill and promise in the visual arts, FICA said in a statement. As part of the award, he would receive a 90-day residency in Switzerland in 2019, supported by Pro Helvetia -- something the jury felt would help develop his practice and in forging further artistic collaborations, FICA said.
> read more

A Conjuror’s Archive


Source MAP
MAP is excited to announce that it will be contributing through a loan of 46 artworks to an exhibition of India’s seminal ‘tribal’ artist, Jangarh Shyam Singh, curated by Dr. Jyotindra Jain and Roobina Karode. Organised at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), A Conjuror’s Archive will explore the oeuvre and legacy of Jangarh Singh Shyam and trace both the evolution of his own practice and his impact upon contemporary and future generations of artists. A whole range of conditions, events and mediations associated with Jangarh’s life and his art practice has since remained underexplored. This exhibition attempts to construct an equitable account of the formation of his prodigious artistic body of work that founded his legacy and grew into a movement. It also probes the efficacy of extra-cultural interventions into an individual artist’s operative and relatively well-grounded indigenous cultural tradition, and asks how the latter interacts with the new, while intentionally reinventing itself.
> read more

lundi 12 novembre 2018

Fraudulence framed: What’s with this picture?


Source Livemint by Vivek Menezes
Nirav Modi placed big artists and their artworks up front in his story of simple-living millionaire boy turned ultra-cosmopolitan billionaire. Both “Souza’s” at his elbows are fakes. Francis Newton Souza died in 2002 on a visit to Bombay from his home in New York, just as the market value of modern and contemporary Indian art had begun to explode. In his lifetime of exuberant highs mixed in with plentiful hard knocks, the 78-year-old never sold a painting for even $10,000, and his passing went largely unremarked. At that time, the poet and critic Adil Jussawalla wrote with great anger about “the near-indifference to his death, the mealy-mouthed praise” saying, “I’m shocked…Surely there’s little doubt he was one of our greatest painters.” In fact, India’s burgeoning art marketplace did respond immediately afterwards, with ghoulish alacrity. Less than twelve months passed after his burial in Sewri cemetery before the top price for Souza’s paintings crested $100,000, then in fairly short order surged well past a million dollars. In 2015, his monumental ‘Birth’ sold for just over $4 million, setting the record for the most expensive Indian painting ever sold (that benchmark has since been broken by his Goan countryman, friend and colleague Vasudeo Gaitonde). Before he died, a good part of Souza’s last years were consumed by rage and frustration because he detected that his work was being widely forged with impunity. On 20June 1997, he wrote an incendiary open letter to Geeta Mehra, the director of Sakshi Art Gallery on Altamount Road in Mumbai, complaining “there are numerous fakes in the art market, not only in India but in Europe. Mr. Julian Hartnoll, of the Hartnoll Gallery, showed me several fakes and forgeries of my work being sold in London…since Indian art has found a fairly stable art market, many unscrupulous persons are dealing in fakes!”
> read more

Kochi-Muziris Biennale: All You Need To Know About The Largest Art Festival In India


Source Republic by Diyali Banerjee
The international exhibition is reportedly the biggest contemporary art festival in Asia and will be held across nine venues featuring 95 artist projects. Works in the exhibition will be contributed by eminent artists including Dayanita Singh, Subodh Gupta and Anish Kapoor among others. It will be organised in several heritage venues including Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, and Durbar Hall in downtown Ernakulam. As per media reports, a team of 20 trained Art Mediators will be residing in Kochi through the span of the event. They will hold guided tours for the visitors, free, and will communicate with them in both English and Malayalam. Visitors will also have the provision of buying personal guided tours with a Mediator. The major art event comes just four months after Kerala suffered a disastrous flood, that caused huge damage to the state. However, the state is reportedly undergoing a fast recovery as several non-profit organizations have joined hands with the government for the cause.
> read more

1000 ancient idols smuggled out of India every year


Source The New Indian Express
An estimated 1,000 pieces of ancient artworks are stolen from Indian temples every year and shipped to the international market, according to Singapore-based Indian-origin shipping executive. "We are estimating about close to 10,000 major work of arts leaving India every decade," said S Vijay Kumar, who has been tracking the theft of venerable gods and goddess for 15 years. Some of these are as heavy as 15-16 tonnes. Kumar has detailed the artwork theft in a book "The Idol Thief", which was launched in Singapore on Saturday. "We have tracked some of the huge objects, 15-16 tonnes sculptures, that have left the country by Ocean containers, declared as brassware and garden furniture," Kumar told. Giving a comparison, he said Italy was the front runner in protecting its artwork with tough laws which has helped recover 378,000 pieces 2012 while India has rescued 27 pieces since 2012.
> read more

samedi 10 novembre 2018

Over 800 photographs of historic India to be offered at an auction in London


Source Indulge by N.J. Pinto
More than 800 historic photographs of India will be offered at Sotheby’s in London on 13th November as part of the Travel, Atlases, Maps & Natural History sale. Many come from the collection of Sven Gahlin (1934-2017), a Swedish-born collector and art historian known for his connoisseurship. His interest in Indian art began in the 1960s when he started building a superlative collection of Indian miniatures, sold at Sotheby’s London for £4.6m in 2015. Now, over 250 photographs from his collection are appearing at auction for the first time, led by a magnificent album including 80 portraits of Indian Maharajahs, Rajahs and Nawabs (est. £30,000-40,000).
> read more

Indian artists reach for the stars


Source Livemint by Benita Fernando
If astronomers have looked for answers by scanning the outer reaches of the known universe, so have artists. In many ways, the cross-pollination between astronomy and art is successful not because of the scope of vibrant metaphors or poetic titles but because the astronomer and the artist consider the fundamental questions of the human condition: Where are we from? What are we doing here?
> read more

Rina Banerjee: Make Me a Summary of the World


Source PAFA
Known for her large-scale sculptures and installations made from materials sourced throughout the world, Banerjee’s works investigate the splintered experiences of identity, tradition, and culture, prevalent in diasporic communities. Using a variety of materials ranging from African tribal jewelry to colorful feathers, light bulbs, and Murano glass, Banerjee’s art celebrates diversity at the material level. These sensuous assemblages present themselves simultaneously as familiar and unfamiliar, thriving on tensions between visual cultures and raising questions about exoticism, cultural appropriation, globalization, and feminism. In turn, her wider practice challenges current nativist political leanings by proposing a multi-faceted nature of identity; not based exclusively on a person’s culture of origin or gender, but instead on self-identity. These inclusive and freeing conceptions of the “self” manifest themselves throughout Banerjee’s ever-evolving work – in fragmented figures, riotous use of color, and symbolic materials. Paired with her thought-provoking and poetic titles, Banerjee’s works relentlessly query contemporary modes of artistic production and societal engagement.
> read more

mercredi 7 novembre 2018

Dame Jillian Sackler Hosts Private Dinner In Celebration Of New Museum Of Art And Photography In Bangalore


Source Hamptons by Lee Fryd
Who are we as a nation and where do we come from? At a private dinner party at Dame Jillian Sackler's home, to raise awareness for the new Museum of Art and Photography in Bangalore, we were happy to be talking about a different democracy. India, an old country populated by the young, has a rich history but a paucity of museums. Surrounded by the museum quality art in Dame Jillian Sackler's living room, we were reminded: Art is our heritage and our legacy. Toward that end, Sackler introduced Abhishek Poddar, who is spearheading the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP) in Bangalore India, geared towards the 65 percent of the country under the age of 30. "The Museum of Art and Photography will be the largest private museum in India but more importantly, it will be the first museum in India with 21st century museum outreach and public programs," Jonathan Marder told us. "Abhishek has donated the first seven million dollars and the first 7,000 objects, with his family. But, it's not enough for one man. He needs help with this project. There are Indians here who have already given collections and donations. And there's tremendous support in India. They've broken ground and in two years they plan to open doors."
> read more

From a woman's eyes


Source The Pioneer
Like Sher-Gil, Fabri was born in Budapest. A Hungarian Indologist, he was invited by Rabindranath Tagore to teach art history at Santiniketan in 1933, and later joined the Archaeological Survey of India, working in Delhi, Lahore and Mohenjodaro. Sher-Gil and Fabri first met at the Faletti’s Hotel exhibition, which Fabri described as a “veritable feast for the eyes” in his review for Lahore’s Civil and Military Gazette. The pair went on to forge a close relationship, with Fabri providing Sher-Gil with crucial emotional and critical support in Lahore. Indeed, her husband Victor is said to have believed the two were lovers. In 1947, six years after her death, Fabri wrote the novel Indian Flamingo dedicated to “the beloved, undying memory of Amrita and her sisters and brothers of the New India”. The novel is the story of the love between John Fawcett curator of the Lahore Museum and Padma a young artist who is in the prime of her youth. Fabri had himself become the curator of the Lahore Museum after the end of the Second World War.
> read more

dimanche 4 novembre 2018

Book Review: Amit Dutta’s ‘Invisible Webs: An Art Historical Inquiry into the Life and Death of Jangarh Singh Shyam’


Source Financial Express by Ashutosh Bhardwaj
The book is rich in references, draws its sources from archives, but is not a mere academic argument. It’s essentially a personal statement of an artist about his illustrious contemporary. Dutta, who made repeated visits to Patan over several years, acknowledges that “Jangarh’s journey across this collapsed and distorted time spanning at least a century backwards, overlapped somewhere with mine too.” Dutta has a remarkable range of works. Several acclaimed films, a novel in Hindi, and his diaries as an Indian film student that have been translated into English. In between, he has written poems in Hindi and short stories for children. The book on Jangarh is perhaps his most intimate work, a space in which he converses with his art in an inverted manner: “Does confronting the self through the other unwittingly amount to judging the other through the self?” His journals record that the depiction of a girl’s suicide in Robert Bresson’s Mouchette drew him towards the form of cinema. It is not certain whether he was aware that he would later find himself decoding a suicide. The book reminds one of Gleaners and I, a movie about the condition of gleaners in France, which is also a metaphor to decode the art of its director Agnes Varda. Filmmaking, for her, is an act of gleaning all that has been left aside by history. Dutta, too, comes across as a gleaner of the remnants of Indian art, with Jangarh as his doppelganger, a double for his life and art.
> read more

samedi 3 novembre 2018

Kerala floods: Kochi Biennale Foundation to raise funds for rebuilding through auction of select artworks


Source The Indian Express
The Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF), which runs the extremely popular Kochi-Muziris Biennale – the country’s largest contemporary art exhibition – has said that it will do its part in raising valuable funds for the rebuilding of Kerala after the devastating floods in August. An auction of select artworks will be held on January 18 next year, the proceeds of which will go into the Chief Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund. Titled ‘Art Rises for Kerala’, the auction will feature art installations, paintings and sculptures of more than 40 artists in India and abroad. Some of the artists whose works will be featured at the auction include Dayanita Singh, Subodh Gupta and Anish Kapoor among others. “The power of art in disaster recovery is significant,” said Bose Krishnamachari, KBF founder-president and the co-curator of the first biennale, in a statement. “Our endeavour reinforces the fact that art goes a long way in re-laying the foundations for a state in its troubled times,” he added. The fourth edition of the biennale will go to the floors at multiple locations in Kochi on December 12 this year and conclude on March 29, 2019.
> read more

vendredi 2 novembre 2018

It’s an exciting time to be a part of the arts in India, feels collector Shalini Passi


Source The Telegraph by Anannya Sarkar
The cream of Delhi’s art-loving upper crust — from Subodh Gupta to Sanjna Kapoor, Bose Krishnamachari and Dayanita Singh — gathered at art collector and connoisseur Shalini Passi’s Golf Links house recently for a peek into the making of the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which will be held in December. While curator of the Biennale, Anita Dube, took guests through the highlights of this year’s calendar art event, Shalini, who is a patron of the event, also launched the Shalini Passi Art Foundation and MASH, a digital platform, alongside. t2 chatted all things art with Shalini...
> read more

Archives revue de presse

Nombre total de pages vues