‘More people are willing to pay more money for Indian artworks’
₹23 crore. In its most recent sale, the British auction house saw similar, promising results as buyers lined up for Indian artworks. The auction, which concluded last week, had a 99% sell-through rate, with a Manjit Bawa painting selling for about ₹20 crore, creating a world record for the artist.
The entire auction raked in a strong $9.9 million, or about ₹84.3 crore, twice its pre-sale estimate, which also included a work by Rabindranath Tagore that fetched $772,382 and one by Bhupen Khakhar that got $1.8 million. India’s art market has never looked better. This year alone, over ₹150 crore worth of artworks have sold at auctions in India and around the world.
Husain’s, Bawa’s, and Tagore’s works join a heady list that have broken records of Indian artworks sold recently. The iconic auction house’s South Asia market is now seriously focused on collectors in India. Ishrat Kanga, director, specialist, and head of sale, Sotheby’s, said people are now spending larger amounts on art and what the auction house sees is that in every single season, a new world record for a particular price paid for an artist in South Asia is being broken.
What is driving this shift is that the market is evolving with newer, younger collectors increasingly getting interested in Indian art. These are collectors who are exposed to art through their families, as well as complete first-time collectors. Today, around 40% of buyers at Sotheby’s Asian art auctions are from India or other parts of South Asia, with the rest being collectors of Indian origin globally.
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