With the hullabaloo over exhibiting husain’s work settled, focus has returned to the main business of art
Up one day, off the next and up again, it had seemed for a while that MF Husain would play party pooper at the Indian Art Summit. But with the government stepping in to take “complete responsibility for the safety and security of India Art Summit”, the focus has shifted once again to the main business of the fair — the looking, buying and selling of art.
And going by indications from the first two days, it seems to be quite a thumping success. Sales, an important measure of the fair’s success, have been brisk. “It’s been good,” says Priyanka Raja of Experimenter Gallery from Kolkata, her smile betraying the understatement. A first timer at the summit, the gallery is showcasing new media art-works by the Raqs Media Collective, Naeem Mohaimeen and Bani Abidi, and has sold over 70 per cent of its works.
Similarly happy is Hetal Pawani, director of the jamjar Dubai, which has collaborated with Grey Noise, a gallery from Karachi, to bring a collection of Pakistani art — Lala Rukh, Ayesh Jatoi, Fahd Burki and others big on the international circuit. “We’ve sold more than 50 per cent of what we got here,” says Umer Butt, creative director, Grey Noise. It helps, of course, that, as Pawani says, Pakistani art has dedicated Indian collectors who have been buying abroad or online over the years, and now have an opportunity to see the works closer home.
But it’s not just the younger, more avant garde (hence less expensive) art that’s finding takers. Peter Femfert of Die Galerie, Frankfurt, another first-timer at this summit, is negotiating prices for a Picasso, a largish work on paper titled “Scene du Tauromachie” (1925), (priced at around Rs 2.30 crore, but the most expensive work this year is a Rodin with a price tag of Rs 6.2 crore at the Robert Bowman Modern booth). He has already sold works by Dietrich Klinge, a German sculptor. His booth also has a small untitled work by the French surreal painter Andre Masson; dated 1925 it is one of his earliest paintings in the cubist mode. “This is a museum quality painting. Unfortunately, no one seems interested in it. It’s Picasso and Dali that Indians seem to know and want to buy,” rues Femfert.
But what has Femfert, Michel Bowman and other art-fair regulars pleased are the hordes milling around and the general air of excitement. This time, despite the Rs 200 entrance fee to Pragati Maidan, there have been over 30,000 visitors in the first two days itself. There are people enthusiastically queuing up to enter, posing with the Subodh Gupta sculpture of a cycle rickshaw laden with his usual steel utensils that takes pride of place right at the entrance; buying catalogues as keepsakes and lining up to see the three Husains that were at the centre of the to-do.
“Networking,” says Sharan Apparao of Apparao Galleries, handing out fliers of the exhibition at her new space at the Aman, a five-star hotel in the city, “is the important thing here.” And with the buzz around Indian art growing stronger internationally, it’s no longer just the domestic buyer and collector who’s the focus.
The summit has become an opportunity for international galleries and museums to have an under-one-roof overview of the range of art from India and there’s a fairly glittering cast of top-executives from these. To name a few — there’s Hans Obrist, director of international projects, Serpentine Gallery, London; Nina Miakk, director, Haunch of Venison, London; Daniel Baumann, a director at the Museum of Fine Arts, Benn; Martin Bethenod, director, Palazzo Grazzi, Venice; Urs Stahel, director of Fotomuseum, Winterthur; Hou Hanru, director of exhibitions at the San Francisco and Sheena Wagstaff, chief curator of the Tate Modern.
And indeed many of these seem to have come not just to see and scout for new talent, but also to buy, especially the larger, and thus more expensive works, by established artists. Sunitha Kumar Emmart, founder of Bangalore-based GallerySKE reports that all the “fairly high value” works by Bharti Kher, Sudarshan Shetty and Sheela Gowda were bought by foreign institutions. “Sudarshan was bought by a private Italian foundation and Bharti and Sheela by institutions in India,” she says.