Monday, March 18, 2013

South Asian Modern and Contemporary art in focus

Christie’s latest auction of South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art takes place on 20 March. It will present a vast selection of exceptional artworks as well as iconic masterpieces by top artists like Maqbool Fida Husain, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, Syed Haider Raza and Jagdish Swaminathan, alongside contemporaries Rina Banerjee, Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Atul Dodiya, Ravinder Reddy and Tayeba Begum Lipi, Bangladesh’s rising star.The sale will also include Zahoor ul Akhlaq, the Pakistani modernist alongside Abdur Rahman Chughtai, plus a group of contemporary practitioners from the region like Rashid Rana, Adeela Suleman and Imran Qureshi. 

Having traveled to the US, Syed Haider Raza was in Berkeley from 1962 until 1963. He was greatly impressed by the California sun. As a result, he painted the monumental Village en Fête (price estimate: $600,000-800,000) after returning to the South of France. A seminal painting, it’s among the earliest of his large-scaled artworks, which includes the top three global auction records: ‘Saurashtra in 1983; ‘La Terre’ in 1973 and ‘La Terre’ in 1985.It looks to express the joy of a humble village festival, the structures of streets and houses providing the perfect pretext for an intricately structured canvas bursting in colors, not least a celebration of his homeland’s vibrant hues.

Throughout his illustrious career, Husain did several paintings that combined the female form and music, two of his very favorite themes. A large untitled canvas as part of the sale depicts a divine female musician (price estimate: $450,000 – 600,000).  Done in the early 1970s, it demonstrates extraordinary command of this legendary artist over color & line in a large space.

The painting executed with enormous amount of vitality, something naturally present from very start of Husain’s career, was homage by him to classical Indian sculpture tradition through representation of the woman in the tribhanga (three bends) pose.

No comments:

Post a Comment