 "Paresh Maity")
Earlier this month, artist Paresh Maity exhibited nine large-scale sculptures cast in bronze and brass, and one installation created with 102 Royal Enfield motorcycles and displayed at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata. For the motorcycles, Maity, who is known more for his water colours and works in oil, dismantled a hundred Royal Enfield motorbikes using welding and grinding tools with a team of assistants. “The bikes were first rendered in clay as models and then the motorcycles were recast into their new shapes,” he says.
Maity has in the past created 30-40 sculptures, including smaller fibre-glass busts, which are part of the Leela Hotels collection. His recent exhibition included a Tata truck, a giant head, a 23-foot bull made of brass bells, a Cassia fistula (the tree is commonly called golden shower) and the motorcycles deconstructed to look like dragonflies and titled Motion.
The smallest of these weighed 250 kg and the largest 3,000 kg.
“It took almost six years to compile all the pieces because creating a sculpture with metal is a long-drawn process,” he says. At an absolute level, Maity could have created many times more pieces in canvas for the same amount of effort and time, but he says “if a sculpture is set up correctly at the right venue and at the right time, it's worth something beyond monetary value. It becomes something that integrates with a city, the people and the environment it's been set up with. That is priceless.”
Sculptors make for just about 20-25 per cent of the total number of practising artists in India, says Rakhi Sarkar, director, CIMA Gallery. “So there is a comparative shortage of sculptures on the supply side. Of the existing lot of sculptors, unless commissioned by collectors, most of them hardly resort to making large works,” she says, adding, “Large sculptures are mainly sight specific and thus rare and fall within the purview of large corporate houses, city municipalities and local government agencies. Small-format works fit interiors of homes more readily and are thus more popular and readily sourced.”
And the demand for these has gone up in recent times, say gallerists.
“I have been getting more and more enquiries of late for small and medium-sized sculptures, as well as antiquities. The demand has grown considerably in the last three years,” says Dinesh Vazirani, cofounder and CEO, Saffronart. “The reason is that collectors have more than one home and also realise the longer endurance of a 3D piece of art,” he adds.
People opting for bigger homes during the pandemic with work life, too, shifting homewards has also created more space for sculptures. And so we are now hearing more and more about first-time buyers of art.
Maity's Tata truck sculpture
Says Anu Menda, managing trustee at Bengaluru-based RMZ Foundation, “Sculptures are a medium through which life and all its uses can be tabled in such an easy format.” What she means is that there’s no ivory tower syndrome with cold, uninviting halls and an intimidating ambience that keeps everyday people out. Menda has herself acquired around 50 monumental works in recent years by a variety of artists.
It’s not profitability that drives artists to sculptures. It's actually the opposite, says Maity. “The amount of time and effort that goes into even a mid-size sculpture is inordinately more complex and extensive than, say, a simple oil painting. That makes it less commercially viable than oil or watercolour. But profit is not the reason why they are created in the first place.”
Harsh Goenka, billionaire art collector and chairman at RPG Group, says that the runway for Indian sculptures has massive growth waiting to be unleashed. “Artists who do pure sculptures are very few, and include the likes of Somnath Hore, Subodh Gupta and Meera Mukherjee,” Goenka says. “Incidentally, one almost always sees better collections of sculptures and installations in New Delhi because of the larger homes, greater city spread and the number of farm and country homes that many there have. It's hard to do that in Mumbai — even for the wealthy.”
Ranjit Shahani, former vice-chairman and MD of Novartis India and an art collector, says that in the last 20-odd years the world of art in India has expanded to become increasingly professionalised, commercialised and spectacularised. “There is a corporatisation and marketisation of the works, which was not the case in the days of artists such as Sankho Chaudhuri, Meera Mukherjee, Pillo Pochkhanawala or indeed Ramkinker Baij,” he says. “There is definitely an uptick in the usage of sculptures in public areas — from spaces of historical significance to fancy shipping arcades.”
He's right. The city of Udaipur, for instance, recently installed sculptures by New Zealand artist Renate Verbrugge on a promenade.
“Go back in history and you see temples of Konark, Madurai, and the caves of Ellora adorned with sculptures. Or, Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Pataliputra... Indian culture has a rich heritage of sculpture,” says Maity.
And Indian collectors, including new ones, it would appear, are becoming increasingly interested in investing in sculptures.
