Gaitonde's unmistakable treatment of the canvas using roller and palette knife, layering, adding and taking away pigment give the painting a marine like quality, conveying his artistic philosophy through its ebbs and flows. The painting, which displays a kind of non-objective chiaroscuro, is a meditative masterpiece and represents a cornerstone in Gaitonde's oeuvre
Christie's upcoming South Asian Modern, Contemporary Art auction on 14 September 2016 will be part of Asian Art Week in New York. The auction presents paintings by leading modern Indian masters, such as Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Syed Haider Raza, Francis Newton Souza, Maqbool Fida Husain and Jehangir Sabavala, alongside significant contemporary works by Bharti Kher, Subodh Gupta, Shilpa Gupta and Sheba Chhachhi. Also included are important works by South Asian modernists George Keyt, Abdur Rahman Chughtai, Rashid Choudhury and Sheikh Mohammed Sultan. The sale offers an overview of the past 100 years of Indian art making.
Ahead of the New York auction, Christie's will present, in its 20th exhibition in India, with 10 selected highlights on view at The Taj Mahal Hotel here. The exhibition opens to public from 24-25 August.Works by Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Syed Haider Raza, Jehangir Sabavala, Francis Newton Souza, Jagdish Swaminathan and Bikash Bhattacharjee, to name a few, will be exhibited ahead of their flight to New York, where these works will be presented at another open to the public viewing at Christie's Rockefeller Centre before the auction on 14 September.
Following Christie's last two auctions of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art in Mumbai and london, where new benchmarks were set for works by Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, including the new world auction record for any modern Indian work of art,the upcoming New York sale will offer an important canvas by the artist. Featured on the cover of the catalogue, the work was painted in 1970 at a moment when Gaitonde was recognised as being at the peak of his artistic powers - in fact the following year, he would receive the prestigious Padma Shri award. Gaitonde's unmistakable treatment of the canvas using roller and pallet knife, layering, adding and taking away pigment give the painting a marine like quality, conveying his artistic philosophy through its ebbs and flows. The painting, which displays a kind of non-objective chiaroscuro, is a meditative masterpiece and represents a cornerstone in Gaitonde's oeuvre (estimate: $1,800,000-2,200,000 / will be on view in New Delhi).
Syed Haider Raza paintedl'Orage (the tempest) in 1975, a fitting title for the climax of his expressionistic use of colour. During this period, Raza increasingly embraced colours over form. Discernible figurative elements of the landscape seen in his works of the 50s dissolved during the 60s and early 70s into expansive explosions of colour. This painting also perfectly presents Raza's powerful emotive longing for the Indian landscape so acutely felt and articulated in the 1970s. l'Orageis is not only a homage to home but the personification of home. Here, Raza invokes a deep sense of land and night by fusing abstract, representational and symbolic forms into a powerful and mystic expression of the mood and atmosphere of the stormy Indian landscape. Rooted in Raza's childhood memories of life growing up in the small and densely forested village of Kakaiya, near the Narmada River valley in Madhya Pradesh, the painting is an evocative expression of the warm, pervasive darkness of the Indian night (estimate: $1,000,000-1,500,000 / will be on view in New Delhi).