Auction of Pakistan’s Modern and Contemporary art in India

Saffronart.com, one among India’s leading art auction houses, just hosted the first ever Pakistani art auction in India. The online auction took place on November 7 and 8. It featured 70 artworks by masters present and past from across the border.

The digital auction event was titled ‘Modern and Contemporary Art of Pakistan’. The COO of Saffronart, Nish Bhutani, has been quoted as saying, "It’s the first time ever we’re hosting a dedicated auction exclusively for Pakistani art though we have had in our other auctions representations of art from Pakistan - on and off. Pakistan and India have so much of shared geography, culture and history that it’s a natural progression of the collaboration that we already have at various different levels."

Its special feature was that the works were affordable in comparison to the price range for Indian art at auctions across the world. The highest priced artwork, for example, was a 2007 untitled acrylic on canvas by Jamil Naqsh (in the range of Rs 12 lakh to Rs 16 lakh). The 74-year-old based in London is among the foremost modern master artists of Pakistan. His position in the country’s art scene is compared to that of Husain in India.

According to Bhutani, this was an excellent opportunity for art collectors. Those not so familiar with Pakistani art scene often get surprised at its affordability especially because their quality is high. The works of art are thoughtful. They comment on the fat-changing sociopolitical and economic environment of the country.

Among the top names featuring at the auction included Rashid Rana ('Ommatidia II (Salman Khan)' - a 2004 digital C print on paper). Faiza Butt ('Justice League', a 2005 ink on polyester film work), Rehana Mangi ('3 Figures (Gadrang)'; gouache, ink and pencil work on Wasli), and Imran Qureshi (gouache on Wasli ('Moderate Enlightenment')

Quite a few artworks blended tradition with modernity. Miniature style is employed for rendering contemporary themes. In fact, that's a popular form with many current artists today in Pakistan.

Graphic portraiture style by Julian Opie at Sakshi

Julian Opie's gripping graphic portraiture style plus his usage of captivating computer-aided design has allowed him move smoothly between the fields of commercial design and contemporary art. In his canvases, on view at Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery, there is no usage of a paintbrush, or the human touch, for that matter. His trademark style is characterized by his pristine forms created via techniques used for making advertising billboards and road signs. Here's a quick look at the artist's career:

• Julian Opie was born in London in 1958, and studied at Goldsmiths College of Art from 1979 - 1982. He lives and works in London. Opie's early works are narrative: irreverent, tongue-in-cheek sculptures based on famous works of art, of everyday objects such food, furniture and books, made from cut and painted steel. In 2000 the artist was commissioned for the cover design of an album for renowned British band Blur. He created an LED projection in 2006 for U2's Vertigo world tour.
• Later works, also made from steel but with an entirely different surface finish, suggested the cool precision of domestic appliances and 'white' goods. His work developed an architectural presence with sculptures made from metal or wood, which recall offices, houses and the architectural detailing of public spaces, combined with references to geometric abstract art and reduced to their most basic elements.
• Over the past decade he has consistently pursued painting with a strong graphic and pared down style. Drawing from influences as diverse as billboard signs, classical portraiture and sculpture, to classical Japanese woodblock prints, Opie 'paints' using a variety of media and technologies which enable him to make three-dimensional explorations of his subjects.
• An example of this is ‘Suzanne Walking’ (2005) which portrays one of Opie's most commonly featured muses. The use of a lenticular print gives the illusion of depth and movement, bringing Suzanne to life as the viewer walks around the work.

(Information courtesy: The British Council)

‘Bombay Bioscope’ by Nilofer Suleman

Bangalore based artist, Nilofer Suleman, (1963, Indore, India) is in Love with India and with each exhibition it grows. Her solo opens at Art Musings in Mumbai is titled ‘Bombay Bioscope’.

Her style juxtaposes the real world on the streets to a softer world where lotuses sprout from any surface, serpents fall asleep daintily in one's hair, and blue-skinned lovers embrace. An introductory note to it elaborates:”Before big screens and Bollywood, there were bioscopes. Beautifully adorned and unassuming, you could peek into them and watch the real world around you disappear, revealing a painted universe. Bombay Bioscope does exactly that…

“Watch Mumbai as we know it dissolve into an older world where stars come to Parsi cafes, dreams are made in old studios, walk through the streets of Chor Bazaar and pick up old crumbling books at Fort; watch a movie in Palace theatre. A celebration of Bombay and all its innocence and beauty, a city that unites and goes on and on and on.”

The artist is inspired by Indian typography and street graphics. Her work is a coalition of styles that weave together a host of Indian influences: animated characters, old and charming lithographs of gods and goddesses hidden away on tin boxes, hilarious misspelt words and matchbox art. Her trademark acrylics draw from a variety of sources from ’70s Bollywood to Mughal miniatures.

In her solo at Art Musings, it’s our beloved kitsch-y city of Mumbai or erstwhile Bombay that has been filtered through her rainbow-hued lens. The 12 works in this show each offer a glimpse of quintessential city settings, from an Irani cafe and golawallah to a lending library and antique shop. Keen followers of her work will spy her favorite mustachioed gentlemen and fish-eyed damsels, here liberally supported by a cast of yesteryear Bollywood stars such as Dilip Kumar and Zeenat Aman.

Iconic ‘The Scream’ revisited

Edvard Munch’s iconic ‘The Scream’ (1895), among the most celebrated and recognized images in art history, is on view at The Museum of Modern Art for a period of six months.

The work has been installed in the Museum’s Painting and Sculpture Galleries, along with a selection of prints by Munch drawn from the Museum's extensive collection of his work. Of the four versions of the painting made by the artist between 1893 and 1910, this pastel-on-board from 1895 is the only one remaining in private hands; the three other versions are in the collections of museums in Norway. ‘The Scream’ is being lent by a private collector.

"The startling power of Munch's original work endures almost despite the image's present-day ubiquity," notes Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, who is organizing the installation. "The visual subtlety and complexity of this composition can't be summed up in a cliché."

A haunting rendition of a hairless figure on a bridge under a yellow-orange sky, The Scream has captured the popular imagination since the time of its making. The image was originally conceived by Munch as part of his epic Frieze of Life series, which explored the progression of modern life by focusing on the themes of love, angst, and death.

Especially concerned with the expressive representation of emotions and personal relationships, Munch was associated with the international development of Symbolism during the 1890s and recognized as a precursor of 20th-century Expressionism. The event is organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture.

In a simultaneous event, contemporary art collides with the modern canon. Eleven emerging artists ‘intervene’ at MoMA, engaging with the Museum's collection in new and unexpected ways. Guests encounter a live restaging of Pablo Picasso’s iconic Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), amateur dream interpretations in the Surrealism gallery, a ’Lookbook’ tour of the collection based on artists’ personal styles (complete with giveaway trading cards), and more.

A subtle portrayal of the fragile female body and mind

Female form retains an uncompromising centrality in Sonia Mehra Chawla’s work. The woman remains at the centre of growth and decay, love and life cycles. The body registers all emotions directly, and carries the marks. Through her subtle portrayal, she brings out how the fragile female body is ephemeral and vulnerable – akin to a site of memory, history, and transformation, even as it continues with its mundane chores, yet registering all shades of emotions, and carrying the marks.

She suggests how ephemeral and vulnerable it is – akin to a site of memory, history, and transformation even while continuing with its mundane chores, yet registering all shades of emotions. The artist deals with a mélange of ideas that make us ponder over fragility, emergence, decadence, dissolution and transience. The forms contain the vitality and essence of the living as well as the vulnerability of inevitable decay.

The talented and versatile artist employs a wide array of mediums to focus on the purging of biodiversity, biomorphic patterning, often relating the urban with the organic in complex layering. She has developed a style uniquely her own combining print making techniques, photographic references and painting using acrylic paints, oils and inks.

Born in 1977 in Kolkata, Sonia Mehra Chawla completed her BFA and MFA in Painting (with a gold medal) from College of Art, New Delhi in 2001 and 2004 respectively. She has worked extensively in etching and lithography - first under eminent Indian printmaker Anupam Sud and then at Atelier 2221, Print and Edition studio.

Among her noteworthy exhibitions are ‘Urban Biomorphic’, Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre, Delhi; ‘The Second Sex: India’, Woman artist exhibition, 10 Chancery Lane Gallery, Hong kong; ‘The Way We Are’, Viart Gallery, Delhi; SH Contemporary 08’, Shanghai; ‘Emerging Directions’ by Apparao Galleries, Gorbio, France; ‘Beyond Boundaries’, The Gallery In Cork Street, Mayfair, London; ‘Live Wire’, Visual Arts Centre, Hong Kong; ‘World One Minutes’, Today Art Museum, Beijing; ‘Art Dubai’ (all in 2008); ‘Identity and Masquerade’, The Photographers Gallery, London (2006-07);‘India-Asia: Changing Paradigms’, Cologne, Germany (2005); ‘Path/ Progression/ Digressions’, Air Gallery, London (2005);‘Moving Image’ courtesy Royal Netherlands Embassy (2004); and ‘Carry on Drawing’, Serpentine Gallery, London (2004).

An elaborate survey of the Pop art movement

The author of ‘Pop Art’, Bradford Collins, received his degree from Amherst College and completed his Ph.D (art history) from Yale. The art scholar associated with the University of South Carolina has been more recently writing on American art in the post World War II period, and more so  Abstract Expressionism, as well as Pop art.

Describing it an engaging survey of Pop art, right from its origins in the 1950s to its later incarnations, an accompanying note to the book elaborates: “Several unjustly neglected women artists are brought to the fore and the meaning of Pop’s revolution is examined through the decades, across Europe and the US. Crucial for the artworks explored, the source materials of consumer culture and popular entertainment are also illustrated and Collins shows how they were used by artists to make their works.

“The writer argues that although the focus of much Pop art was popular culture, some of the artists’ responses were critical, some complicit and some ambiguous. And Pop artists also dealt with an extraordinary range of other individual, artistic and historical issues – from sex, love and death to aesthetics, from the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War to feminism.” In essence, Pop Art‘’ is an engaging and elaborate survey of the Pop art movement, right from its origins in the 1950s to its most recent incarnations.

Apart from explanatory illustrations, it contains biographies, glossary, maps and chronology for further understanding of the subject to establish how pop art was looked upon as a mode, an art form than a movement in the strictest sense of it. Collins goes to show how its practitioners were not constrained by any shared values, as many of the previous movements. He terms Pop a watershed development in the evolution of modern art, representing the moment in it when several artists tended to acknowledge the fact that the media imagery belonging to mainstream capitalist culture, from comics to movies to advertising, had become, knowingly or unknowingly, the stuff of their creative consciousness.

An artist who portrays harsh realities

Jagannath Mohapatra, whose works put up by ICIA drew spontaneous responses from visitors at Art Expo India 2009, is known to be an artist who follows his heart. He remains faithful to his inner instinct instead of resorting to gimmicks in his works. This is probably why he has managed to hold the attention of art critics and connoisseurs in spite of his maintaining a low-profile thanks to his distinct style and subject matter.

His paintings make the viewers pause and ponder over the fact that even as our progressive nation, clamoring for a superpower tag, rightly boasts of its monumental achievements on eve of the completion of sixty years of freedom, there are harsh realities of our socio-political existence that cannot be ignored. He puts forward his views through his paintings, but leaves it to the viewers to draw their own conclusions.

A student of history, Jagannath Mohapatra chooses painterly themes that are contemporary in context. This sensitive and socially conscious painter creates thought-provoking works that act like a mirror, and make the viewers confront the harsh realities of life. His visual realm is invariably linked to the realities of life.

Providing an insight into his works, senior artist K. G. Subramanyan has mentioned: “He belongs to the generation of young painters who ground their visuals on the unreality of the realistic image that they encounter in billboards and hoardings, in trade journals and television commercials, or at least, a transformed, jazzed up, over-stated reality, now cloyingly romantic, now tantalizingly intriguing.

“Some of them doctor these images with arresting juxtapositions or incongruous insets and envelope them with a covering of cynicism or a critical comment. Jagannath Mohapatra is one of them. However, his paintings neither have a cynical tone nor have any open critical content. His paintings are mostly soaked in the dissembling juiciness of this second-line reality.”