Inside the Indian Art Market

Inside The Indian Art Market

Francis Newton Souza Atul Dodiya Aicon Gallery to Relocate to Lower East Side Indian Art Soars, Russian Art Disappoints at Christie's Asia Week Emerging Artists to Benefit from Indian Billionaire's Charity London Dealer Must Return Souzas Bought "in Good Faith" Bonhams Holds First Middle East Auction

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

At Sotheby’s the same week, the grand total for its Indian art auction reached $1.8 million, with Atul Dodiya’s Mirage bringing in $216,000. Records also were set for works by Jitish Kallat and Sudarshan Shetty.

Six months later, prices are still on the rise.

“What used to sell for $10,000 (five years ago) is now selling for $100,000,” said Claude Simard, director of the New York-based Jack Shainman Gallery, which has been representing Indian artists for four years.

“In some cases, with senior painters, prices have risen 1,000 percent in the past 10 years,” added Peter Nagy, who left New York for New Delhi 15 years ago and operates his Nature Morte gallery out of India. “The market has been so robust and so crazy the past few years, just about anything you say would be true regarding somebody.”

It was only two years ago that the first Indian artwork surpassed $1 million at auction, when Christie’s sold Tyeb Mehta’s Mahisasura for $1.6 million. However, with the contemporary art market already operating at such a fever pitch, demand for that “next big thing” has begun to trickle over into the Indian art sector. Now, longtime collectors of the genre are starting to compete at auctions with major art funds and hedge fund executives.

Veronica Collins, a specialist in contemporary Indian art at Christie’s, expects that competition could also drive prices up further at this month’s four sales of Indian art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. “There is certainly potential and depth in the market,” she said.

Market Forces

The impetus behind the expanding interest in Indian art is multifaceted—a combination of the robust international art market and India’s booming economy, according to experts.

“This growth and development of the Indian economy has created a whole new layer of society, with a large group of people eager to acquire social and cultural status and fascinated by their own cultural heritage—a recurring phenomenon whenever new wealth is created,” Collins said.

At Jack Shainman in New York, about 50 percent of its art buyers hail from India, with the other half coming from Europe and the United States.

That number is even higher for Nature Morte, in New Delhi, where the market for Indian painting is 80 to 90 percent Indian; however the market for other mediums—photography, sculpture and installation—is increasingly cosmopolitan, noted Nagy.

Another gallery specializing in Indian works, Bodhi Art, caters to a more international market, given that it opened its first space in Singapore before establishing outposts in Mumbai, New Delhi and, last year, New York. Still, the Indian market seems to wield a heavy influence there. New York gallery head Karen Stone Talwar told ArtInfo that her Chelsea exhibitions are all chosen by the directors in India.

Artistic License

Aside from just collectors, changes in India have also impacted artists. Rajan Krishnan, a painter from Kerala, in southern India, said cultural transformations within the country have contributed to both the quantity and quality of works being made—a result of gradual changes and globalization brewing in India since it gained independence from Great Britain in 1947.

“In the past 10 years there has been a phenomenal growth in the number of young artists and the artworks produced in India,” said Krishnan. He opened his first New York solo exhibition at Bodhi Art in January with a reception that drew 1,000 people.

“The new generation is more open to what is happening in the world, and there are less taboos,” he said. “Perhaps it’s the art that is creating the market and not the market that’s creating the art.”

Claude Simard agrees, explaining that cultural awareness is expanding rapidly in India, and that shows in the work, partly because more young artists are studying abroad. “[The work] is less provincial,” he said.