Playing the market?

BUSINESS CLASS

The art world has something to cheer about. Nature Morte, arguably India's most exciting gallery, which had no permanent address till now, has settled down in a swank, 4,000 sq ft space in Niti Bagh, a posh colony in south Delhi.

Nature Morte, run by New York artist and dealer Peter Nagy is now backed by multi-millionaire doctor and inventor Arani Bose who also runs Bose Pacia gallery in Manhattan.

Even though the art world is rife with rumours that Nature Morte might just become a collecting vehicle for the NRI millionaire, Nagy's reputation as a hardcore curator will allow him to show a lot more experimental and avant garde work.

This kind of work has been absent in Delhi. However, what is certain is that the New Delhi/New York duo certainly means serious business and they are here to shake up the establishment.

Peter Nagy started Nature Morte in 1982 in the East Village of New York. During his frequent trips to India, he become increasingly interested in the art scene here which was going though rapid changes in the post-economic liberalisation of 1991.

Nagy opened his Delhi chapter from the then unheard of Visual Arts Gallery at the India Habitat Centre with memorable group shows of artists such as Bharati Kher, Surendran Nair, Manisha Parekh and Rekha Rodwittiya.

The following year he gave Dayanita Singh, Anita Dube and Shibu Natesan (all superstars now) their first solo shows.

But selling unknown artists who made experimental and transcendent works was not an easy task. Thus Nagy curated shows for other dealers (like Bose Pascia) and museums both in India and abroad to keep himself and the gallery afloat.

It was during the late 1990s that he began his first project with Bose Pacia, by writing a catalogue for Mumbai artist, Jitish Kallat. He later curated shows for the gallery every summer.

As the artists shown between the two galleries were fairly similar, Bose offered to fund Nagy's dwindling enterprise in India.

Between the two partners, they offer artists the intellectual and curatorial impetus as well as an assurance of shows in the Big Apple with the possibility of acquisition "" a surefire success formula.

Things have become more interesting of late, after Bose's patented invention in the field of neurosurgery was bought by a big multinational for a sum known to be vast by any proportion.

And the effect on the art market is omnipresent and has changed the markets for the artists that are of interest to Bose who has been buying complete shows of his artists, let alone just paintings.

In the last year alone he bought up complete shows of Arpita Singh and Atul Dodiya and large chunks of works by Subodh Gupta and Jogen Chowdhury, to name a few.

By most estimates, Bose would qualify as the most active art collector in the Indian contemporary art scene and that is precisely why each of his moves is beginning to be scrutinised.