Talented artists to watch out for

With prices having reached attractive levels, most market participants expect a positive development in 2013, indicating the overall optimism that prevails in the Indian art market. In this context, it is advisable to go for a mix of artists - the modern and contemporary, established and emerging ones - as each segment has its own strength and potential.

• Besides Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, Akbar Padamsee, Badri Narayan, Atul Dodiya, TV Santhosh and Jitish Kallat, several others like NS Harsha, Jagannath Panda, Baiju Parthan, Rashid Rana, Shilpa Gupta, Paresh Maity, Tejal Shah, Jayashree Chakravarthy, Arpana Caur, and Jayashree Burman have carved a niche for themselves.
  
  
• Works by the second generation moderns including Manjit Bawa, Ganesh Pyne, Laxma Goud, Prabhakar Barwe, Nalini Malani, and Gulamohammad Sheikh can be considered for investment, as they hold immense value and importance, both historically and also in terms of the market.
• You may reserve part of your portfolio for the young and emerging contemporaries in the form of George Martin, Nitish Bhattacharjee, Hindol Brahmabhatt, Jagannath Mohapatra, Rahul Chowdhury, Jagdish Chander, Prasanta Sahu, Nikhileswar Baruah, Amarnath Sharma, Rahul Arya, Inder Vir, Prajjwal Choudhury, Anu Agarwal, Heeral Trivedi, Jignasa Doshi, and Meetali Singh.
• There are a host of other names like Suhasini Kejriwal, Chitra Ganesh, Susanta Mandal, Rahul Chowdhury, Suryakant Lokhande, Viraj Naik, Justin Ponmany, Thukral & Tagra, worth a consideration.

Working with ideas, which are highly personal, simultaneously representing the shifts and complex changes occurring worldwide, highly talented artists from the country are treading new paths that blend the historical past with the present, strike a balance between fact and fiction, fuse old and new identities, and raise socially relevant issues during a challenging period of societal flux, evolving a new visual and thematic idiom, in the process.

In essence, look for artists who have gradually built their reputations, backed by renowned galleries - local and international.