Sotheby's Annual Sale of Indian Art in London Realizes GBP 4.2 Million |
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| Tuesday, 06 May 2008 04:54 |
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LONDON - Sotheby’s sale of Indian Art in London realised £4,289,775, a figure handsomely in excess of pre-sale expectations (estimate was £2.4-3.4 million). The sale, which was extremely well attended both during the pre-sale exhibition and in the saleroom today, saw spirited and competitive bidding throughout. It demonstrated that the international profile of and market for Indian Art continues to surge forward. 67% of the lots in today’s sale sold for prices in excess of their pre-sale high estimate and an impressive 11 new auction records were established for names including Rabindranath Tagore and Jitish Kallat, among others.
The sale offered some 120 lots of exceptional quality and provenance which traced the course of Indian Art over the last century and encompassed works by key figures of the Modern Indian Art movement, such as Francis Newton Souza and Akbar Padamsee, through to the cutting-edge names of Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher and Jitish Kallat. A new auction record by medium was also set for Subodh Gupta. The sale’s top selling lot was Francis Newton Souza’s (1924-2002) The Red Road, which was hotly contested by at least seven bidders before selling to a client on the telephone for £580,500; the painting had a pre-sale estimate of £250,000-350,000. One of the stars of the Modern section of the sale, the canvas was a gift from Souza to his wife Maria in 1962, a period widely acknowledged as the artist’s most successful, and it was later bequeathed by Maria to the present owner. The painting was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. Two works by Akbar Padamsee (b. 1928) were other notable strong performers in the Modern section of the sale. This artist’s Untitled oil depicting a nude sold for £252,500 against an estimate of £150,000-200,000 while his Untitled archetypal landscape, which is the result of a series of experiments juxtaposing colours and exploring textures, fetched £264,500 against its pre-sale estimate of £150,000-250,000. The conspicuous success and performance of Indian Contemporary artists at auction that has been seen of late progressed even further today and was another extraordinary highlight of the sale; works from this period frequently doubled or trebled their pre-sale expectations. An Untitled canvas by Subodh Gupta (b. 1974) was the top selling work of this group, achieving £264,500 against a pre-sale estimate of £70,000-100,000 and establishing a new auction record for a canvas by the artist. The successful sale of this work, which dates from 2005, comes hot on the heels of the artist’s triumph in Sotheby’s international sales of Contemporary Art in both London and New York earlier this year. Other strong results in the Contemporary offerings included: TV Santosh’s (b. 1968) oil on canvas A Handful of Ashes, which sold for £102,500 against its pre-sale estimate of £30,000-40,000; a colourful large-scale diptych by Thukral & Tagra (b. 1976 and 1979) entitled Stop Think Go which sold for £102,500, against a pre-sale estimate of £30,000-40,000; and Jitish Kallat’s (b. 1974) work from a series collectively titled Humiliation Tax, which realised £58,100 against the estimate of £25,000-35,000 – an auction record for the artist. Estimated to fetch in excess of £80,000, the group quadrupled this by realising a total of 346,425 and the top selling lots were: Rabindranath Tagore’s (1861-1941) Death Scene, which made £144,500 against an estimate of £15,000-20,000 and his Bird, which sold for £70,100; and Jamini Roy’s (1887-1972) Santal Couple which sold for £29,300. Tagore’s Death Scene established a new auction record for the artist. Visit Sotheby’s at : www.sothebys.com/ Click on logo below to add this article to your favorite Social Website ~ |
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