Colin Gleadell spots some canny speculating in the market for Indian art:
Demand for the playful paintings of Indian figurative artist Bhupen Khakhar, who died in 2003, has continued to bubble away right up to the eve of his Tate Modern retrospective exhibition, which opens this week. In March, we pinpointed Khakhar as an artist to watch just before his 1970 painting, Church Gardener, was offered in New York with a £140,000 estimate. It sold for £346,000. Then last week, a smaller painting from 1986, At New Jersey, appeared at Christie’s in South Kensington with a £50,000 estimate and sold for £134,500. The seller, a collector from Hong Kong, may have sensed how Khakhar’s market was going a little earlier. They bought this painting at auction in New York in 2014 for £53,000; that’s a mark- up of 154 per cent in less than two years.
Market News: museum-worthy art discovered at home (Telegraph)
