Amrita Sher-Gil’s rare portrait of husband fetches over Rs 10 crore at AstaGuru sale

Source Hindustan Times
Modern Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil’s rare portrait of her husband Victor Egan fetched a whopping price of Rs 10.86 crore (1.210.000 €) at AstaGuru’s recent ‘Modern Indian Art’ online sale, the auction house said in a statement. “The results validate modern Indian art’s strong, as well as stable demand and also establishes its huge potential since the lots presented achieved significant prices and witnessed competitive bidding,” said Siddanth Shetty, V P Business Strategy & Operations, AstaGuru. S H Raza’s “Sanshari”, an acrylic on canvas work created in 1994 was the third most valuable sale at Rs 4.19 crore (approx). The auction also featured works by artists like Jehangir Sabavala, Prabhakar Barwe, F N Souza, and Tyeb Mehta.

Museum of tomorrow: Are we heading for a digital reset of the museum?

Source Financial Express by Reya Mehrotra
Several new ventures are putting the museum online by offering viewers a virtual interactive experience. Which brings us to the question: Are we heading for a digital reset of the museum? Simplicity is an extraordinary trait in Bhuri Bai’s work. The artist, who is from the Bhil Adivasi community, paints traditions and murals in earthy and primary colours, with a certain ‘Bhilness’ to her approach. Her imagination draws inspiration from her roots—her village (Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh) and its flora and fauna—and replicates itself on canvases ranging from walls to paper. It was her art that helped Bai secure a prominent place in an otherwise male-dominated community, making hers a story of strength and courage.
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‘The Afterlife of Silence’ in-depth analysis of Jogen Chowdhury’s still lifes

Source The Siasat Daily by Vishnu Makhijani
How did the title come about? “I actually remember the exact moment when it came about. By then I had already finished reading (American poet and memoirist) Mark Doty’s intriguing book on still life, and a sentence from it had been haunting me for quite some time: ‘still life resides in absolute silence’. We were discussing about the proposed still life show at Jogen-Da’s place, when suddenly the title came to me, instinctively, not really as a product of conscious thought. Later I found it to be quite the perfect title as it encapsulated not only the silence and the stillness so central to still life, but also the movement of its implied narratives, which continue to have independent afterlives even beyond the frozen moments within the artworks. In fact the title captures the in-betweenness of still life, its connection both with life and death, stillness and movement,” Ghosh elaborated.
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Swiss Collector Buys Kelton Collection of Australian Indigenous Art

Source Ocula by Sam Gaskin
Swiss investment manager Bruno Raschle acquired 'a significant portion' of the Kelton Collection of Australian Indigenous art, according to D'Lan Contemporary, who helped broker the deal. The purchase includes Papunya boards and canvases from the early 1970s, and paintings by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Lin Onus, among others. It also includes what Raschle describes as 'a wealth of unpublished documents and videos'. Raschle said his collection 'will seek to contribute to building an inclusive and transparent narrative of the Australian Indigenous culture and will be further developed with the goal of serving as an important resource that encourages the spirit and culture of the Australian Indigenous people to continue well into the future.' The Australian Financial Review described the Kelton Collection as 'arguably the most important collection of Australian Indigenous art outside a public institution'. They estimated Raschle spent at least AU $10 million to acquire the works.
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COVID-19 has taken a heavy toll on folk and tribal artists: Delhi-based curator

Source The New Indian Express
Meena Varma is out with a new online exhibition at India International Centre honours folk and tribal artists of India. The Delhi-based art gallerist and curator, delving into arts for 30 years now, talks about how life has changed for these artists after the pandemic, and how her gallery, Arts of the Earth, has supported the artworks of these creative individuals. COVID-19 has taken a heavy toll on folk and tribal artists. As it is, artisans had very few platforms to showcase and sell their works and now, with the pandemic, even that has come to a standstill. Fortunately, a few other galleries and also an auction house have taken an interest in folk and tribal art, and are putting in a lot of effort to promote their works. Hopefully, it will produce results.
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For the love of history

Source The Pioneer by Uma Nair
Presenting masterpieces of sculpture, painting, prints and ritual objects from India, Tibet and around the world, an exhibition on Tantra offers new insights into an age-old philosophical theory. A tantalising exhibition on Tantra, a greatly misunderstood word that has been tossed into the realms of sexual ardour by the West, but the British Museum creates an epic sojourn in art history by bringing together sculptures, prints and paintings as well as a stunning recreation of the famous Chausathi Jogini Mandir in Hirapur just outside Bhubaneswar.
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Bengaluru's Museum of Art and Photography to make digital debut on December 5

Source Business Traveller
The Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), in Bengaluru, is making its digital debut on December 5, with the week-long programme, Art (is) Life and inaugurating their Museums Without Borders initiative. MAP’s building is still under construction owing to the delay caused by the pandemic. This will be south India’s first major private art museum. MAP’s digital initiative will offer curated experiences, allowing participants to soak in Indian culture from the comfort of their home. MAP has a growing collection of over 18,000 artworks, primarily from the subcontinent and dating from the tenth century to the present.
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Contemporary Excavations

Source Frith Street Gallery
Frith Street Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of works by Gauri Gill, James Nelson, Daniel Silver and Rajesh Vangad, curated by Sandhini Poddar. Contemporary Excavations explores the mining of classical, modernist as well as Indigenous art histories and how these knowledge systems are appropriated, synthesised, and made new in the work of these artists. Gauri Gill has a complex photographic practice containing several lines of pursuit. They are characterised by Gill’s interests in feminism, Buddhism, community, ecology, and education. Gill has had a long engagement with precarious communities including nomadic, tribal and small peasant groups in rural Rajasthan in India over the past two decades, as seen in her ongoing series, The Mark on the Wall. Beginning in early 2013, Fields of Sight is a collaboration with the renowned Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad, combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing to co-create new narratives. The Warli define their relationship to existence through Mother Nature and farming and fishing are crucial to their livelihoods. Their ancient matriarchal art form, dating back millennia, was practiced solely by the women of the community until recently. Considered as a leading exponent of this art form, Vangad’s paintings showcase the tribe’s intimate and sensitive relationship to the land and to agricultural cycles, expressed through the harvesting of grains.
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20 Women Running The Indian Art Scene

Source TheArtGorgeous by Abhinit Khanna
The ecosystem and infrastructure in South Asia looks credible more now than ever before by bringing in a steady stream of international visitors, collectors, researchers and curators. In India, Mumbai has often competed with Delhi to be the art capital when it comes to commercial galleries, institutions and museums. However, the scene is now mushrooming in cities like Ahmedabad, Baroda, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata, by building new visual art spaces, enthusiasts and young art gallerists. India has also seen a huge shift in taste in arts, design and music. The younger generation is eager to explore and work in the field of visual arts and culture. They have also realized that it’s an industry, which was earlier controlled and enjoyed heavily by the upper class individuals making it difficult for the new entrants to succeed in the arts industry. While one can still argue that the wealthy individuals largely enjoy the power, some still have hope in few powerful opinions within the Indian art world. In order to shed light to these emerging as well as established powerful voices we made a comprehensive list of 20 leading ladies running the Indian art scene.
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An Extraordinary Homecoming

Source India Currents by Shonali Madapa
Barbara Kipper’s promised gift of 464 objects from her remarkable collection of Asian jewelry and ritual objects to the new Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bangalore, is exceptional in more ways than one. Besides being a gift, it’s the first time the Chicago art collector’s generosity has extended to an institution based in her collection’s geographic origin. While most countries strive to repatriate precious cultural artifacts forcibly taken away during oppressive foreign regimes in their varied pasts, what is unusual in this instance is Kipper’s firm belief that these artifacts rightfully belong to the culture of their origin.
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Converting art into alphabet

Source Livemint by Avantika Bhuyan
In fact, collaboration is at the heart of what Typecraft does. Founded in 2012 by visual designer and educator Ishan Khosla, in partnership with Andreu Balius and Sol Matas, the project is a one-of-its-kind, creating a digital typeface from a craft or tribal art. As Khosla states, the initiative combines traditional knowledge systems with design and digital technology. So far, the team has collaborated with craftswomen, who practice Chittara floor art, Godna tribal tattoos, Paakko and Soof embroideries, Madhubani art and the Barmer appliqué and patchwork. They have three type faces available in the market and four more are set to be out. The process of font creation varies from craft to craft, depending on the motifs and the ascribed meanings for each. The latest in the series revolves around the Mithila art from across the Madhubani district of Bihar. However, the work on that is going slow due to the ongoing pandemic. The Typecraft team has made a conscious decision to work only with craftswomen. “When you support women, the whole family benefits,” says Khosla. The idea is not just to provide livelihood but also bridge the gaps between design and craft, rural and urban, mainstream and the subaltern.
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In photos: Costume designer Bhanu Athaiya’s paintings and fashion illustrations are up for auction

Source Scroll In
The renowned costume designer Bhanu Rajopadhye Athaiya, who died on October 15, was also a trained and skilled artist. Athaiya graduated from Mumbai’s JJ School of Art in 1952. She was the only woman to have three paintings at a show by the Progressive Artists’ Group in Mumbai in 1953. In 1982, she became the first Indian to win an Oscar, for Richard Attenborough’s biopic Gandhi. Athaiya’s paintings and drawings were made between 1945 and 1952, before she set out to design costumes for Hindi films.
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Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde: The Late Indian Modernist That Made A Mark In History

Source Asia Tatler by Christine Andas
In September 2020, an unprecedented victory for Indian art had occurred within the walls of Pundole, an auction house in Mumbai. The late Indian Modernist Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde's oil painting, Untitled (1974), had been sold at an auction for 4.5 million dollars, surpassing his previous record. The painting comes from the collection of Masanori Fukuoka, owner of Glenbarra Museum in Japan.
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How covid-19 has darkened India’s cultural season

Source Livemint by Somak Ghoshal
If winter is waiting in the wings, can India’s art and culture season be far behind? As with so much in 2020, the answer to this question is a despondent yes. If 2020 is the year of the pandemic, it is also the year of postponements, as two recent announcements drove home. Earlier this week, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) postponed its forthcoming edition, scheduled for December, to 2021. Days ago, the organisers of the India Art Fair (IAF) also decided to move its next edition to 2022. The Jaipur Literature Festival is yet to firm up plans for 2021, though its online programming continues.
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Chitra Ganesh on Utopia, Futurity, and Dissent

Source Ocula In Conversation with Jareh Das
Jareh Das :I grew up in Lagos in the 1990s where everyone watched a lot of Bollywood movies and it is still very popular. I remember Nagin (1976) centred on a female protagonist who could transform herself into a snake, and the movie follows her quest to avenge the death of her lover. I bring this up because I recall, in these movies, prominent themes of the 'avenging woman' who was also often depicted as a goddess. What themes and elements of the visual language of Bollywood movies interest you, and when did you first engage with these movies and the visual and popular culture around them?
Chitra Ganesh : It's amazing that you bring up Nagin! One of the posters for this film, in particular, has been iconic for me. Growing up in the Queens and Brooklyn boroughs of 1980s New York City—before the birth of VCRs and home movie culture—there was a local theatre that screened Bollywood films, so I actually saw the film on screen.
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We will develop a digital platform to host online show: Bose Krishnamachari

Source The New Indian Express
The much-awaited fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) – one of South Asia’s top arts initiatives that has put India on the global contemporary art map – has been postponed to November 1, 2021 due to the raging pandemic. Bose Krishnamachari, Biennale Director, tells The Morning Standard about the unfavourable conditions in Kerala that led to this decision and participating Delhi-based art entities.
What led you to postpone KMB just one month before the opening date?
The decision to postpone the date of opening was taken at the beginning of this month, but was made public only after we had spoken to all of our artists.
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Experiments with colour at Frieze London

Source Livemint by Avantika Bhuyan
With the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, like most fairs across the world, Frieze London too has decided to go the virtual route. A wide array of forms, mediums and styles can be seen on the online viewing rooms of international galleries. Indian galleries too are adding to the discourse on how artists are interpreting the changes taking place in the world today, with their deeply personal takes on politics, gender, the environment and more. While Experimenter focuses on the body and its relationship with the space around it with Radhika Khimji, Praneet Soi, and others, Nature Morte showcases Jitish Kallat’s immersive installation, Covering Letter (terranum nuncius), as part of the Frieze Focus section, 'Possessions', curated by Zoe Whitley. The one thread that emerges from the various showcases is the focus on colour and materiality. Galleries are using this to talk about personal stories of resilience, as is evident in Vadehra Art Gallery’s display of Benodebehari Mukherjee’s rare paper-cut collages created after he lost his eyesight, or an exploration of the spiritual that Jhaveri Contemporary is showing with Prafulla Mohanti’s solo display.
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How a Danish family built an extraordinary collection of modern Indian art

Source Livemint by Somak Ghoshal
The family own an array of pamphlets from gallery shows which Gunnar and Inger attended, but never ended up buying any paintings from – showing that they were actively learning about and discovering artists all the time, but that they were also selective, and carefully considered which art to buy before making any purchases. It was a collection which they very much built together for their family home, and with each other’s tastes in mind, but some works were their personal favourites. Gunnar for example especially loved the works of Nareen Nath, and the flower paintings by B. Prabha carry Inger’s name on the receipt. Another secret to their success was their forward-looking vision – the art they were buying was, at the time, not yet in the mainstream in India. Even the likes of Ram Kumar and V.S. Gaitonde were still very much on the ascendency at the time the Hansens were buying. They really followed their heart. Theirs was a collection of mostly young, promising Indian modernist painters which they wanted to hang in their home of course, to live with, but also to support this rising generation. It is a real joy, now around half a century later to peel back the lid, and rediscover this art – all of it unpublished – with similarly same fresh eyes that Gunnar and Inger collected with many years ago.
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V.S. Gaitonde's £3.4m record-breaking painting leads strong South Asian sales season

Source The Art News Paper by Kabir Jhala
In fact, business is booming. According to data collected by the Indian art market intelligence agency Artery, 77 artists have made their records since January, compared with an average of around 40 in the same time period over the last several years. Artery's founder Arvind Vijaymohan also points to recent instances where big-ticket private sales—a "significant" Tyeb Mehta and a Gaitonde currently held in London—have been cancelled upon noting the strength of this month's auctions. Both works are now in talks to be consigned for next season's sales. "We are still a relative trickle compared to global sales, having clocked just above 25 years of a formal mainstream market practice," Vijaymohan says. "There is however tremendous growth potential, as evidenced in the market's performance over the past six months—rising sharply while the economy is in a slump. We must however follow a wide-set, global vision, and not remain myopic in our perspective."
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How to see an ‘Indian’ painting

Source Time Magazine by Benita Fernando
In the last eight years, filmmaker Vaibhav Raj Shah has made over 150 artist films. Most of them were commissions by important players in the Indian art world, such as the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India Art Fair and Serendipity Arts Festival, and featured interviews and portraits of artists. In the course of this filmmaking experience, Shah observed that most of his Indian audiences, whether in India or abroad, “know about David Hockney but not Bhupen Khakhar”. Instances like these, where Indian artists command lesser familiarity than their international counterparts, are only far too many. One of the possible reasons is the relative absence of accessible information on Indian art, especially on contemporary practitioners. ARTHISTORY+, Shah’s new digital project, is aimed at filling this lacuna in art education.
> read more > see all the videos on youtube

How Urmila Devi Found Liberation in Mithila Painting

Source News Click by Tarique Anwar
“My husband used to draw a rickshaw to earn a living. We were faced with extreme poverty, and arranging two meals was difficult. With the aim to support my husband’s earning, I began practicing paintings. But he did not like it. He used to thrash me and burn my paintings in the earthen stoves at home. He did not want me to work and go outside because women stepping out were not appreciated in those days. But he could not deter me from doing something good for the family and my children. I continued practicing silently. Whatever I earned after selling the paintings, I spent it on the education of my children — two of them are now acclaimed artists,” the 70-year-old said. “After I received the state honor in 1985-86, my husband’s attitude completely changed. He now began supporting me and respecting my work. He even accompanied me when I first stepped out of my village to go to Patna to receive the award. Since then, I have enjoyed his support. The art completely changed my life. It enabled me to impart a good education to my children and lead a respectable life in society,” she said.
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Remembering Kapila Vatsyayan: A Civilisational Voice in Post-Independence India

Source The Wire by Ashok Vajpeyi
Kapila Vatsyayan was a civilisational voice in post-Independence India – she embodied in her vision and her work, a deep understanding of tradition and an openness to modernity. She was one of the very few scholars who could understand and highlight the continuum between the two. Her scholarship covered both the Indian traditions of scholarship and the international Indological traditions. Again, this was rare – more often than not you have scholars who understand one or the other. She was able to combine them in creative and imaginative ways.
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Prateek and Priyanka Raja: Gallery as Incubator

Source Ocula by Stephanie Bailey
When we started the gallery, we felt a very strong urge to locate ourselves in Kolkata, not only because both of us are from the city. We decided to open the gallery here because there are things about the city that make it unique: for one, its cross-cultural, decentralised, connective tissue. It's important to exist in a place where the audience has the space to disagree and dissent and debate, and reference or cross-reference across history, literature, science, and culture. Not only was Kolkata one of the very important colonial and pre-colonial centres of exchange, but it's also located close to the largest delta in the world, so it's where everything kind of comes together or flows in and flows out into a larger world. It was something we thought about consciously as being a node, not just ideologically, politically, or geographically, but even from the point of view of how people are here. This is a place where things are disseminating or have always disseminated. That makes a very different kind of audience, that is learned and able to cross-reference.
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V. S. Gaitonde A new world record for Indian art

Source The New Indian Express by Vandana Kalra
On September 3, when an untitled 1974 oil on canvas by V S Gaitonde came under the hammer for Rs 32 crore ($4.36m) at an auction by the Mumbai auction house Pundole’s, it set a new world record for Indian art. Bought by an unnamed international buyer, it was part of the auction titled “Looking West: Works from the Collection of the Glenbarra Art Museum, Japan”, owned by Japanese businessman and art collector Masanori Fukuoka. It was reportedly estimated to sell between Rs 15 crore and Rs 25 crore. The same auction also saw the sale of an untitled 1993 work by Jagdish Swaminathan for Rs 9.5 crore, which set a new record for the artist.
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Gauri Gill ON SEEING

Source BAMPFA
Gauri Gill, who has been called “one of India’s most respected photographers” (New York Times) and whose work is featured in When All That Is Solid Melts into Air, talks about the evolution of her photographic practice, her collaborative projects, and her ongoing engagement with rural India since 1999. Various of Gill’s ongoing projects highlight her sustained belief in collaboration and “active listening” and in using photography as a memory practice. Her work addresses the twinned Indian identity markers of class and community as determinants of mobility and social behavior. It is marked by empathy, surprise, and a human concern over issues of survival. Among her projects is "Notes from the Desert," a decade-long study of marginalized communities in rural Rajasthan. Since 2013 she has collaborated with Rajesh Vangad, a renowned Warli artist, on "Fields of Sight," combining the contemporary language of photography with the ancient one of Warli drawing.
> see the video

When a Japanese fish baron decides that Pundole’s Mumbai will auction some of his collection

Source Times od India by Uma Nair
“When Masanori Fukuoka first walked into the gallery in 1990, one presumed he was a Japanese tourist making some purchases on a business trip to India. Happily that was not to be. A few months later, he re reappeared; wanting to know more about artists he had seen at the NGMA in New Delhi on his previous visit. He was impulsive and was certainly buying more than an individual needed to decorate his home. Later one learnt that he wanted to understand Indian modern art better, by living with it over a period of time in Japan. Before one knew it, he had built an extension on vacant land adjoining his food processing factory in Himeji, and opened The Glenbarra Art Museum for his personal pleasure, as well as to expose Indian art to the local public."
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In Amit Dutta’s bold and beautiful cinema, an unforgettable exploration of Indian art traditions

 Source Scroll In by Suresh Chabria 

Dutta belongs to a small band of independent filmmakers in India who persist in exploring and expanding the possibilities of the film medium. His films are situated at the intersection of Indian art history, philosophy, literature and narrative traditions articulated through formal experimentation with the devices of cinema. In this ambitious project he may be reckoned to be extending the work of earlier great avant-garde filmmmakers like Ritwik Ghatak, Kumar Shahani, and particularly Mani Kaul, whose elliptical and layered aural and visual style is perhaps the chief influence on Dutta’s films. However, in contrast with his predecessors, Dutta’s films bring to the fore a newer sensibility that is not soaked to the same extent with the sensual dimension, ideological impulses or the gender-conscious trope of the Mother Goddess myth.

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Tyeb Mehta sets new world record for South Asian art at Christie’s post-lockdown art auction in New York

Source Money Control by Deepali Nandwani
The late artist, one of the stalwarts of India’s Progressive Art Group (PAG), has consistently drawn top dollars in the auction market. In 2018, his work, Kali—a dramatic painting with the goddess in blue colour with a red mouth — set a world record of $4 million in a physical, on-ground auction. And now another of Mehta’s painting, Falling Figure created a new benchmark in post-lockdown online auctions by realising $975,000, achieving the highest price for a South Asian Modern + Contemporary work since lockdown in Christie’s New York’s sale, which was part of the Asian Art Week online.
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Mrinalini Mukherjee: Force(s) of Nature

Source Ocula by Stephanie Bailey
Bagh, which translates to garden, is a fitting title for Jhaveri Contemporary's current exhibition of works by Mrinalini Mukherjee (29 February–31 July 2020). It was in the garden towns of her youth where Mukherjee developed a deep and enduring relationship with nature that charged her practice. The exhibition marks the first time Mukherjee's early etchings and late bronze sculptures have been shown in conversation. The etchings were created in the 1970s and 80s at the Garhi studios in New Delhi and shown for the first time at the 2018 Kochi-Muziris Biennale. They depict vibrant woodland scenes that reflect the artist's formative years growing up between the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India, and Santiniketan in West Bengal, where Mukherjee's father, the renowned artist Benode Behari Mukherjee, taught at poet Rabindranath Tagore's experimental art school Kala Bhavan, which celebrated nature and folk traditions in its independent curriculum.
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in Touch

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The house of art, the story of a gallery and an art revolution

Source The Telegraph by Ruchir Joshi
Often an important transformative moment in a city’s history becomes identified with a neighbourhood or even a house. While Colaba is not Montmartre, Bandra is not Bloomsbury and Kekee Manzil not quite Jorasanko, the mansion on the Bandra seafront was a hugely important site in the development of modern Indian art. Behroze Gandhy’s eponymous film, Kekee Manzil: The House of Art, is a documentary about her parents, Khorshed and Kekoo Gandhy, who played such a central role in launching the art scene in Bombay between the 1940s and 1960s. Part decade-traversing home-movie, part archive footage buffet, part Films Division homage (complete with constant Voice of God commentary and wall-to-wall background music, including a tabla riff exactly at the mention of a riot), the film offers many riches. If you are at all interested in modern Indian art, or in our country’s recent urban cultural history, or in the city once known as Bombay, or in the story of contemporary Parsis, or in interior decoration, or in the changing texture of the moving image over the last seventy years, then you shouldn’t be able to take your eyes away for any of the film’s 90-minute running length.
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Woodson Art Museum exhibit features artwork of India

Source Woodson Art Museum
Spice up summertime by experiencing contemporary artwork of “Many Vision, Many Versions: Art from Indigenous Communities in India.” This exhibition, featuring dazzling patterns, vibrant colors and nonlinear storytelling, is on view at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Musuem through Aug. 30. Learn about life and culture in India through artworks from central India’s Gond and Warli communities, the Mithila region of Bihar and the narrative scroll painters of West Bengal. These distinct and imaginative Indian cultures are united by a common love of narrative as a source of meaning in daily life. The resulting artwork is imbued with tradition, yet dynamically responsive to contemporary global issues. The exhibition features more than 40 paintings and drawings by 24 artists, including Jangarh Singh Shyam, Jivya Soma Mashe, Sita Devi and Swarna Chitrakar.
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Publication of the book "Richard Long - India"

Publication of the book "Richard Long - India" work in progress photos Hervé Perdriolle. This book is one of the rare photographic testimonies allowing us to discover Richard Long's works in progress inspired by his first trip to India. More information and online order:
> herve-perdriolle-editeur.org

Art Basel 2020: The pandemic triggers a virtual shift in art

Source Livemint by Avantika Bhuyan
With a new online-only exhibit for Art Basel, gallerist David Zwirner stresses the need for the art ecosystem to embrace technology - During my 27-year-long career, I have seen that when new regions enter the art market, such as South America, China, Japan and now India, the emphasis in the early years is on local artists—artists from the country that you know and art which reflects the traditions you are familiar with. It is only after you start exchanging information with an international group of collectors that you open your eyes to visual traditions from other countries. One such genre is that of contemporary art from Europe and the US, which we are now bringing to India. This is just the beginning and the dialogue with international art in the country is still in its early years.
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Swadesi's 'The Warli Revolt' goes viral on TikTok and WhatsApp

Source RadioandMusic by RnMTeam
Mumbai-based multilingual hip-hop crew Swadesi 's seminal single, The Warli Revolt, has been found going viral courtesy TikTok and WhatsApp statuses. The anthemic single that became a rallying cry for the Save Aarey movement proved to be a career defining moment for the crew who quickly found themselves becoming the voice of socially conscious hip hop in the country. Over the last month, the track has seen a resurgence amongst folks with a clip of Swadesi's live performance of the same at the 2019 edition of India’s largest crowdfunded music festival Control ALT Delete going viral over WhatsApp statuses and TikTok. Swadesi has amassed well over amillion organic views on user generated content and over 500K on the original track itself.
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Adivasi revolt that ushered in change for all

Source Frontline
For the region, 1945-46 must have been a heady time. After almost a century of injustices, there was unity, leadership and personal freedoms; it must have felt like a new dawn in the lives of the Adivasis. The Parulekars, the Kisan Sabha and the Adivasis kept up the tempo. The Warli Adivasi Revolt started out as a fight against bonded labour and lagnagadi and went on to become a fight for wages for work, land ownership and forest rights. What began as a movement to liberate Adivasis blossomed into a fight for basic democratic rights and laws for the general population. In 1948-49, the Maharashtra government was forced to enact the first tenancy legislation in the State. Since the law came about because of the Adivasi struggle for ownership of land, it was only appropriate that it was first implemented in three tehsils of Thane district. The Tenancy Act was soon implemented all over the State. This was followed by legislation that prohibited Adivasi land from being sold to a non-Adivasi person. In 1960, Godutai led the first ever morcha (march) in India demanding forest land in the name of Adivasis; 46 years later, in 2006, the Forest Rights Act was enacted.
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Success for the sale of a small drawing by Jangarh Singh Shyam

A drawing by Jangarh Singh Shyam of 1994 9x6.5 in - 22.9x16.5 cm sold on June 9, 2020 at Saffronart for the sum of $4,087 (incl of Buyer's Premium) setting a new record (concerning a work of this format) for this legendary contemporary Indian tribal artist, present at the Magiciens de la terre (Centre Pompidou 1989) and to which three major books have been dedicated in recent years.
> see auction results

Waiting to make your first big post-lockdown purchase? Acquire a stunning Souza

Source Architectural Digest by Nolan Lewis
While economists are still evaluating the impact of the global meltdown caused by the Coronavirus pandemic and the mercurial volatility in international prices, every wise investor knows that even the darkest economic recessions come with a silver lining—they can be profitable phases to invest in real estate or buy that work of art you’ve been eyeing forever. “Although the global lockdown has been a pandemic to numerous situations and on a number of levels, I have noticed that in terms of fine art purchases, the market has actually increased and become more robust, especially in terms of online sales. While this doesn’t necessarily apply to the prices of each individual work, this does apply to the volume of sales, which I have noticed have increased and are quite fantastic! Especially in online sales,” notes Francis Patrick Souza, the son of expressionist painter F.N. Souza and Founder of the F.N. Souza International Fine Arts Foundation & Family Trust Inc.
> read more

IN TOUCH

IN TOUCH, a digital exhibitions platform created in collaboration between galleries, presents it's second iteration live from today until July 5th at www.artintouch.in. The participating galleries of In Touch Edition 2 are: Chemould Prescott Road, Bombay; Experimenter, Kolkata; Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai; Gallery Espace, Delhi; GALLERYSKE, Bangalore/ Delhi; Green Art Gallery, Dubai; Grey Noise, Dubai; Nature Morte, Delhi; PHOTOINK, Delhi; Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai; The Third Line, Dubai; and Vadehra Art Gallery, Delhi. The In Touch platform will additionally host collateral online programming including gallerist connects and artist talks conducted digitally.
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NON-FICTION: THE FORGOTTEN INDIAN ARTISTS

Source Dawn by Nageen Shaikh
The British did not colonise the Indian Subcontinent only for spices and land. In fact, they were quite deeply enamoured of the indigenous flora and fauna of this diversely populated part of South Asia. In the late 1700s, British patrons of the East India Company hired many local Indian artists to create albums and folios with intricately detailed and polished paintings and drawings of India’s native bounty — the natural world of plants, animals and birds. These works were collectively termed ‘Company Painting’. However, the degradation of traditional Indian painting, because of the arrival of colonial forms of education and the dawn of photography, overshadowed these original works, driving them well into obscurity. The book Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company accompanies the art exhibition of the same name at The Wallace Collection, a museum in London. As the exhibit jolts our fascination by bringing these obscure Indian masterpieces to public view, the catalogue is refreshingly complete with an introduction by the exhibition’s guest curator and historian William Dalrymple.
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Zarina Hashmi, Artist of a World in Search of Home, Dies at 82

Source The New York Times by Holland Cotter
In recent years the political scope of Ms. Hashmi’s work has sharpened, in prints that refer to anti-Muslim violence and the plight of persecuted refugees. Even then, in its scale and reflective mood, her art remains as personal and intimate as a diary. Regret colors the narrative. (“Nobody is left in our house at Aligarh. Rani is gone. My parents are gone. Home has become another foreign place.”) But something like serenity settled in. “I have had people come to my show and start to cry,” Ms. Hashmi said in her interview with the Met. “I always ask them why, and usually they say, ‘That is our story also.’ A lot of them were people who were exiles from their own country: Holocaust survivors, or people who had the desire to return home. I realize that if you tell your story and if someone can come and cry on your shoulder, that is sharing.”
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Art in the time of COVID: 10 galleries from India and Dubai come together for a one-of-a-kind digital exhibition

Source Architectural Digest by Kriti Saraswat-Satpathy
Even in the grimmest of times, art has the power to uplift, bring about a change and influence. Take this COVID-19 quarantine time for instance, with art talks, conferences, exhibitions and auctions being suspended. But creativity cannot be contained, and as a response to this pandemic, a new-age, futuristic digital platform has emerged called ‘In Touch’ that will bring together a diverse range of programmes, exhibitions and artists from various galleries. For its first edition, 10 galleries from India and Dubai will be showcasing works of artists that hold relevance in this unique time. We give you a preview of this unique, innovative digital exhibition.
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Artist Dhruvi Acharya’s watercolours, which are up for sale, are helping tide over this crisis

Source Architectural Digest by Ritupriya Basu
“I paint because I almost have to, for my peace of mind,” says artist Dhruvi Acharya, when quizzed about her relationship with art. Painting, for Acharya, is a process that is equally cathartic and meditative, a telling aspect of her practice that reflects in her elaborate, psychologically complex drawings. Ever since India went under a nation-wide lockdown to battle the Coronavirus pandemic, Acharya started painting, almost compulsively, to help untangle her thoughts and take stock of her emotions.
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IN SCULPTURES AND PRINTS, MRINALINI MUKHERJEE CAPTURED THE WILDNESS OF NATURE

Source Art in America by Skye Arundhati Thomas
Born in Mumbai in 1949, two years after Indian Independence, Mrinalini Mukherjee, who died in 2015, belonged to a generation of artists emerging in the 1960s who attempted to decolonize the young nation’s visual arts. Primarily a fiber-based sculptor, she used materials indigenous to South Asia, like hemp, jute, cotton, wool, and sisal, updating Indian craft techniques to develop a unique hybrid language that combined the traditional and the modern. She frequently modeled her sculptures on flora but—as Nilima Sheikh recalls in the catalogue for the artist’s 2015 retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi—had no interest in “pretty English landscapes.” Instead, her inspirations tended to be wild and tropical: spiky date palms and lush mango groves, bougainvillea and plantain trees.
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Zarina Hashmi (1937-2020): An artist whose work is woven with ideas of displacement and mobility

Source Scroll'in by Zehra Jumabhoy
Ideas of displacement and mobility are woven throughout her oeuvre. The subject of home is key: Father’s House 1898-1994 (1994) is a print depicting the floor plan of her childhood home. In Homes I Made/A Life in Nine Lines (1997) a set of nine spare, shadowy prints represent the homes Zarina occupied during her adult life. Homes I Made (1984-’92) is a collection of minute aluminium and terracotta houses, fitted with wheels. Most famous of all is Home is A Foreign Place (1999) a suite of 36 woodblock prints, which includes a miniature floor plan of her Aligarh home; a vertical line and a horizontal one; black triangles; cream squares and crosses. Most of these fragile forms are accompanied by Urdu words for “journey,” “border,” “road,” and “time”. Home is a shifting concept in these works – as it was in her life.
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Internationally celebrated artist Zarina Hashmi passes away

Source The Daily Star by Zahangir Alom
The enigmatic lines took innumerable forms in Zarina Hashmi's works – at times they appeared as political borders, on other occasions, they exemplified her interest in architecture. They were jagged veins that denoted vague and distinct memories that the artist gathered from experiences and interactions with people and places across the world. Zarina Hashmi lived in numerous cities, from Aligarh to Bangkok, Paris, New York and London, and in every place, she sought to create a home. She passed away in London, at 83, after a prolonged illness. Contemporary Indian poet, art critic, cultural theorist and independent curator Ranjit Hoskote made the announcement about the death of the celebrated Indian-born American artist on Twitter, on April 26.
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Mortimer Chatterjee and Tara Lal on pushing the boundaries of contemporary art

Source Elle India by Krutika Behrawala
While Instagram helps with the outreach, it’s made their job as gallerists more challenging too. “There’s an assumption that once you’ve scrolled through the exhibition online, you don’t need to make the effort to visit a gallery…” he rues. Lal interjects, “That’s a disadvantage because then, you can never know the impact of an artwork.” Their unfettered spirit and diverse choices reflect in the gallery’s curatorial calendar, which is increasingly seeing exhibitions related to historical material. Their recent exhibitions have shone the spotlight on lesser-known artists such as Riten Mozumdar and Rustom Siodia. “The Indian art scene has been so focused on five-six names that it has missed out on a rich history. We enjoy teasing out these forgotten stories and hope to keep doing so,” says Chatterjee.
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Overlooked No More: F.N. Souza, India’s Anti-Establishment Artist

Source The New York Times by William Grimes
His art would find new admirers. Tate Britain, as part of the 2018 exhibition “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud, and a Century of Painting Life,” set aside an entire room showcasing 10 of his works. Later that year, the Asia Society in New York included several of Souza’s works in “The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India,” a show devoted to the Progressive Artists’ Group, and a stirring reminder of Souza’s headlong charge into the future. “We were bold and full of fire,” Souza told The Times of India in 1989. “We were forging a modern Indian art with a blast!”
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Carpe Arte encourages you to support Indian contemporary art by engaging with it.

Source Carpe Arte
Carpe Arte is a play on the Latin ‘Carpe Diem’ and encourages you to Seize the Art. An art enthusiasts organization, We aim to build a community that supports Indian contemporary art by engaging with it and making it more accessible through talks, gallery walk-throughs, workshops, VIP previews, visits to private collections and visits to artists studios. Art is an important part of our history and it is important that we support it but this can only happen if we engage with it. The art world can be daunting, we help simplify it by giving you access to all the information, inviting you to join us when we attend events and encouraging you to ask questions – we truly believe there are no stupid questions when it comes to understanding art.
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Allegory of unheard Dhongariya Kondh’s (tribal) of Odisha

Source India City Blog by Nimi Shasharma
Allegory of unheard Dhongariya Kondh’s (tribal) of Odisha Under the canopy of Niyamgiri Hills situated in Odisha resides an endangered and unheard group of tribal known to be Dhongariya Kondh. The forests of Rayagada and Kalahandi are home to 8000 tribals. For these tribals, the hills are home to their God Niyam Raja. These hills are situated miles away from the hustle of city, behind the woods. Since generations, these tribal groups are breathing in this fresh air and sustaining on the fruits, vegetables, cultivation and by practicing horticulture. They spend their time together by singing, dancing, chanting old mantras, weaving, knitting and helping each other. They were elated in their own tiny world till Vedanta came into their lives.
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The Indispensable Modernist: Francis Newton Souza

Source Livemint by Vivek Menezes
Precisely 18 years ago, the tumultuous and meteoric life of Francis Newton Souza came to an end. The great Indian modernist had been based in New York for decades but died on 28 March 2002 while visiting Mumbai, the beloved city of his youth and initial ascent to notoriety. He was buried two days later,with only a handful of witnesses, and no family members in attendance. The rest of the world barely paid any attention at all. Writing in the Deccan Herald a fortnight later, the poet and editor Adil Jussawalla was white-hot angry about what he called “the near-indifference to his death, the mealy-mouthed praise". He wrote: “I’m shocked. He was more than a friend. Surely there’s little doubt he was one of our greatest painters." Jussawalla pointed back to the artist’s A Fragment Of An Autobiography, first published to great acclaim in England in 1955, then republished in India, writing, “Hardly anyone in a city which buys, sells and talks art all the time and which has pretensions to be one of the art’s international capitals, seems to have been interested in buying the book since copies can be bought off one of the city’s pavements at ₹10 each." He quoted this unforgettable passage: “I was a rickety child with running nose and running ears, and scared of every adult and every other child. Better had I died. Would have saved me a lot of trouble. I would not have had to bear an artist’s tormented soul, create art in a country that despises her artists and is ignorant of her heritage." Concluded Jussawalla, “It’s something I read with great bitterness now."
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One World Through Art: A Review of Modernisms at the Block Museum

Source Newcityart by Chris Miller
Sixty years ago, Abby Weed Grey began traveling to Iran, Turkey and northern India to collect art. A childless, recently widowed St. Paul housewife, she used her late husband’s small fortune to establish a foundation for “the encouragement of art through the assembling of international collections of art for cultural exchange programs.” Such a project may have been inspired by the tours of “New American Paintings” throughout Europe, sponsored by the CIA in the late 1950s. She focused on Middle Eastern artists who were “breaking with the past to cope with the present,” much like modern artists in Europe and America had been doing for half a century. It does not appear that she had any aesthetic or ideological requirements—except that, like the mainstream art world of her day and ours, she must have considered beauty, naturalism and idealism to be outdated relics from another era.
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Home of Warli Adivasi revolt, Talasari’s loyalty to the Left deepens

Source The Indian Express by Kavitha Iyer
There is no memorial at the banyan tree around which the Warli Adivasi Revolt of 1945 began in Talasari taluka’s Zari village. Nearly 5,000 indentured tribals who gathered here from Thane, Vikramgad, Dahanu and Palghar had refused to work on landlords’ fields until they received 12 annas a day in wages, their resistance sowing the first seeds of rights-based movements among the region’s indigenous communities. Today, the younger generation in Zari, 150 km from Mumbai, has no more than a faint acquaintanceship with their ancestors’ historic struggle but a blend of that history and contemporary circumstances keeps Talasari’s adivasis loyal to those who led that revolt, the Communist Party and the All India Kisan Sabha.
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Delhi: This new show celebrates legendary works by SH Raza and Akbar Padamsee

Source Architectural Digest by Uma Nair
Rare artworks by the masters are not just precious pieces of possession—they are also timeless assets, things that can be cherished for generations to come. Nishad Avari, Specialist, Head of Sale | Associate Vice President, South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art at Christie’s writes in from New York to comment on this epic exhibition at Vadehra Art Gallery: “Two of India’s greatest modern artists, Sayed Haider Raza and Akbar Padamsee always approached their respective practices with deep thought and intense focus, constantly pushing boundaries and innovating their unique visual vocabularies. Till their very last years, both artists continued to paint tirelessly, and are survived by impressive and diverse bodies of work. ”
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India’s indigenous modernist: Jyoti Bhatt

Source Times of India by Uma Nair
Bhatt’s vast documentation of rural India brought him into the web exploring folk, tribal and rural arts-his stint in photography to document India’s indigenous tribes and arts in its villages brought him close to traditional art, culture and rituals. Traditions in rural rhythms led him into a journey of a lifetime. The imagery drawn from the popular and from tribal and folk juxtaposed with artistic intervention developed over the years became his leitmotif. These symbols of religious, social and cultural importance became a tool to comment on the change and transformation in society. Soft sarcasm and soothing seductive satire aided his narratives. Identity and the hybridisation of the lived everyday idiom became his insignia. At the Bihar Museum in Patna, art lovers regaled over his contours, the expression emanating an enchanting journey of 60 years in printmaking. Happy Birthday Jyoti Bhai.
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In Conversation with Shine Shivan

The champion of Indian art

Source Livemint by Avantika Bhuyan
A new film chronicles Kekoo Gandhy’s role as a central figure on the contemporary art scene. In the 1940s, the showroom of Chemould Frames on Princess Street in Mumbai—a frame-manufacturing business run by a young Kekoo Gandhy—would be abuzz with exchanges on art. European Jewish immigrants such as Walter Langhammer, an Austrian artist—who had come to India to flee the Nazis—would drop in for a chat. This spurred Gandhy’s interest in art and he went on to establish Gallery Chemould, India’s first commercial art gallery, with his wife, Khorshed, in 1963. Gandhy, in the course of time, hosted exhibitions by Bhupen Khakhar, Tyeb Mehta, S. H. Raza, Vivan Sundaram, Nalini Malani, and Atul Dodiya, who are now at the forefront of contemporary art.
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After a Boom and a Bust, the South Asian Art Market Is Finally Maturing

Source Artsy by Payal Uttam
The coronavirus outbreak may be keeping art collectors away from cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore, but it didn’t affect footfall at the India Art Fair (IAF) in New Delhi earlier this month. “I’m sure if people came here they would be very surprised,” said Indonesian collector Tom Tandio while standing in a bustling fair aisle. “A lot of international collectors have the wrong perception about contemporary South Asian art. They think it’s very traditional, but it’s not.” “There has been a big change this year,” said Jagdip Jagpal, the director of IAF, stressing growing international interest in the region. “People come across works by South Asian artists in Europe and the United States, which has piqued their curiosity, so they came to Delhi. There’s really been an impact.” “The art fair is a huge benchmark for how the market is looking,” said Kishore Singh, who heads exhibitions and publications at Delhi Art Gallery. “Today, you can feel a new energy.”
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CPI(M)'s red flag continues to fly in Maharashtra's Talasari

Source Deccan Herald
The twin Thane-Palghar districts have the glorious legacy of the Warli Adivasi Revolt against landlordism that began 75 years ago, in 1945, under the banner of the Communist Party and the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS). "The legendary leaders of this... > read more

Portrait of the Artist

Source The Indian Express by Parul
“I regret I was not able to archive the contributions of Manjit Bawa, Sohan Qadri, KG Subramanyan and Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh. The smaller towns and rural areas do not have resources or facilities for the study of fine arts, so what do the students do and where do they get the information. Here, we are focussing on archiving the entire spectrum. We have also started documenting artists from Punjab, in Punjabi language, and I believe every state should do this. We must create in our own language and our own thoughts and not on borrowed idioms. The younger generation must be aware of its own art history, starting from folk, classical, modern and then to world art and we hope this documentation will support their passion,” adds Manna.
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How designer Riten Mozumdar shaped modern Indian aesthetics and sensibilities

Source The Indian Express by Benita Fernando
In artist Monika Correa’s sari collection, there was one with block-prints that instantly recalled Rome. It was made using a block designed by Riten Mozumdar, a close friend of Monika and her late husband, architect Charles Correa, in 1961. Mozumdar had seen the Palazzo della Civilta Italiana, also called the Square Colosseum, in Rome, and recreated its rows of arches on a block. With this design, that he called Rome by Night, Mozumdar captured an essence of Roman architecture and distilled the city’s history into a geometric pattern. Mozumdar designed several more saris, and even a kimono, for Correa, using block-printing and calligraphy, long before other Indian artists made it fashionable to paint textiles. Geometric block-print patterns were unheard of in India before that. Correa says, “Riten was the first person to revitalise block-printing post-Independence. There were others but they were traditional, doing the same thing over and over again. Riten was experimenting.” The garment, the block, the maker and the wearer come together in “Imprint”, an ongoing mini retrospective of Mozumdar’s work at Chatterjee & Lal in Mumbai. The exhibition pays homage to this relatively understudied designer, who blurred the lines between art, craft and design.
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Block Museum Of Art At Northwestern University Continues ‘Year Of Global Modernisms’ Exhibition Series

Source Forbes by Chadd Scott
A broader interpretation of Modern art has only recently begun taking hold with museums introducing artists of color, women and artists operating outside of the traditional art capitols into the 100 year story of Modern art they’re telling. The most prominent example of this new direction occurred last fall with New York’s Museum of Modern Art taking advantage of a complete renovation to vastly expand its presentation of works from African-Americans, women and artists around the globe. Similarly, the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Chicago launched its “Year of Global Modernisms” in 2019. This series of exhibits explores the under-recognized innovation and risk-taking in art beyond Europe and North America during the mid-20th century, expanding Western perspectives of Modern art. With nearly 700 artworks, 114 on view in this show, the Abby Weed Grey Collection represents the largest institutional assemblage of modern Iranian and Turkish art outside of Iran and Turkey as well as the most important collection of modern Indian art in an American university museum.
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