The Green Cape by Jehangir Sabavala, painted in 1974 and Tyeb Mehta’s 1957 work, Girl in love, will be auctioned at Christie’s second outing. A public preview will happen here in November
Christie’s will hold its second auction in Mumbai on December 11. This follows the success of the inaugural auction in India held a year ago. A strong selection of works will be also publicly previewed here at The Taj Mahal Hotel from November 28 to 30.
The inaugural sale in 2013 established the highest price for a work of art ever sold in India and the sale total of Rs 96,59,37,500 (USD$15,455,000) doubled pre-sale expectations with 98 per cent of the lots sold, a testament to the strength of the market and the interest in India’s cultural heritage from the national and international collecting community.
The sale on December 11 will be offering approximately 80 lots of the best of modern and contemporary Indian art. With the specialist team still working on the consignments for the sale, early highlights include The Green Cape by Jehangir Sabavala, painted in 1974, with a pre-sale estimate of Rs 1,20,00,000-1,80,00,000, an early work by Tyeb Mehta, entitled Girl in love, from 1957, which will be offered with an estimate of Rs 70,00,000–90,00,000 and Bhupen Khakhar’s reverse painting on glass from the 1970s,Untitled (Chavanu),with an estimate of Rs 40,00,000 – 60,00,000. These initial highlights shed light on a critical period in the development of Indian modernism and of the artists’ oeuvres as well. Alongside these masterpieces, a separate section of striking contemporary works by artists including Subodh Gupta, Rashid Rana, Mithu Sen, Thukral and Tagra, Nilima Sheikh and Bharti Kher will be offered to benefit the Delhi based Khoj International Artists Association, a globally recognised artist residency. All the artists have donated works to Khoj exclusively for this sale.
This year marks the 20th year that Christie’s has had a presence in India. This October, New York will be under the spell of Indian culture with the opening on October 26 of the much-anticipated Vasudeo S Gaitonde retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum and the inauguration the following evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art of Treasures from India: Jewels from the Al-Thani Collection. Christie’s is one of the sponsors for the Gaitonde exhibition and their international director of Asian Art, Dr Amin Jaffer, made the original study of the Al Thani collection for his book, Beyond Extravagance. Christie’s will also be previewing a selection of highlights from the Indian sale at its Rockefeller Center galleries in New York.