Manjit Bawa artwork fetches nearly ₹20 crore at Sotheby’s auction, a record for the artist
₹20 crore), a record for the artist, at Sotheby’s recent Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art auction in London. The entire auction raked in $9,948,988 ( ₹84.3 crore), twice its pre-sale estimate, the company said, with over 88% of the lots surpassing their estimates and all but one of the 77 lots finding a buyer. Sotheby's said Bawa's artworks, influenced by traditional Indian colours, are renowned for their vivid palettes.
The untitled work was painted in 1995, 10 years before the artist’s death, and reimagines Shiva in a contemporary context. The auction also included artist Bhupen Khakhar’s seminal ‘People at Mosque’, which sold for $1.8 million ( ₹14.7 crore). This was one of Khakhar’s earliest painted works, from around 1967, and marked the beginning of the painter’s neo-miniaturist style, Sotheby's said.
Displayed at Khakhar’s first solo exhibition in New Delhi that year, the painting was acquired soon after and emerged after almost half a century for this auction. The auction saw another record, with a masterwork from Rabindranath Tagore's late period fetching $772,382 or ₹6.4 crore. Painted a few years before his death in 1941, the artwork has resided at Dartington Hall for 80 years and was offered along with other artworks by the Dartington Hall Trust.
Other highlights included works by Sayed Haider Raza, Maqbool Fida Husain, Francis Newton Souza, Ram Kumar, Zainul Abedin, Jagdish Swaminathan, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Zarina. This has been a record-breaking year for Indian artists. Last month an Amrita Sher-Gil painting titled The Story Teller, signed and dated 1937, fetched a staggering ₹61.8 crore at an auction by SaffronArt, a record for an Indian artwork.
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