Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
Last week, Saffronart held their Summer auction with the Tyeb Mehta’s Kali as the lead lot. Saffron previously sold the work eleven years ago for nearly $1m. This time around the painting made just about $4m. That’s not a bad return especially considering that the market for South Asian art had cratered for a time in the interim.
The Telegraph’s Colin Gleadell identifies the buyer of Tyeb Mehta’s record-setting £2.74m ($3.5m) work—surpassing the previous record of £1.9m ($3.2m) set five years ago—sold last week in London:
The buyer was the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi.
The Museum is backed by Kiran Nadar, the wife of a techno-billionaire, and India’s leading collector of modern and contemporary art. It also bought an early, pop-art inspired painting by Bhupen Khakhar, the subject of a major Tate exhibition last year. Khakhar’s market took off in the lead-up to the Tate show and seems now to have settled as this 1965 work sold within estimate for £161,000.
Tsars on horseback square up for the Russian art sales; a new auction record for Zao Wou-Ki (telegraph)
Eagle-eyed Colin Gleadell has a great item today following up on Sotheby’s unexpectedly successful New York Modern and Contemporary South Asian art sale two weeks ago. The $6.5m sale found buyers for 91% of the lots. Gleadell identified one of the sellers. It turns out the the collector did very well for himself:Continue Reading
John Elliott pays attention to the Indian art market. The October sales of Indian Modern and Contemporary art followed anunexpectedly strong sale at Saffronart in September in Mumbai.
In London, Christie’s suffered through a $3.8m sale that was mostly held back at the top end of the market. Sotheby’s, by contrast, held its own with a $4.9m sale that included a V.S. Gaitonde work that nearly doubled in price since it was last sold in 2013 even though it sold below the low estimate.
That wasn’t the only winner at Sotheby’s. Here’s Elliott:Continue Reading
Saffronart is holding a live sale in New Dehli with coverage on the internet today. The top lot is an SH Raza, La Terre that made a price of $1.166m which puts it as the 10th highest price at auction for Raza, according to Artnet’s database.
In 1962, Raza was invited by Professor Karl Casten to teach at the University of California in Berkeley. Although short, his time in America altered his creative approach. It was here that he found a muse in the abstract expressionist works of the New York School of painters such as Sam Francis, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffman and particularly, Mark Rothko. As Raza states,
“Rothko’s work opened up lots of interesting associations for me. It was so different from the insipid realism of the European School. It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy. Rothko’s works brought back the images of japmala, where the repetition of a word continues till you achieve a state of elevated consciousness…Rothko’s works made me understand the feel for spatial perception.” (Raza: Celebrating 85 years, Aryan Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2007)
A second Raza sold for $240,000 at the sale, significantly above the high estimate.
