London, June 1: Indiansare now rich enough to buy back some of their artistic treasures, according toan expert at Christie’s, the London auction house which has placed a pricebetween £1.3 million and £1.8 million on a painting by Syed Hyder Raza.

If Saurashtra, the 200cmx200cm acrylic on canvas, achieves itstarget, it will exceed the previous record of £1,273,250 for La Terre, 1973,another of Raza’s works, set at a Christie’s auction in June 2008.

Well-heeled Indians are flooding London for two auctions onconsecutive days — the estate of Francis Newton Souza on June 9, followed by asale of works by, among others, Raza, M.F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Bhupen Khakhar,Subodh Gupta, Ganesh Pyne, and Jamini Roy on June 10.

The latter auction has three other works by Raza, valued at£5,000, £8,000 and £150,000 but is led by Saurashtra whose £1 million plusestimate has not been plucked out of the air.

This reassurance was given by Yamini Mehta, a Mumbai girl whogrew up in America but moved over after seven years with Christie’s New York toChristie’s London to be its senior specialist and director of the contemporaryIndian art department.

“Raza himself considers Saurashtra to be one of the 10 mostimportant works he has done in his life,” she told The Telegraph.

Raza, who is 88, has been invited to attend the auction.

“The artist, though living in France for more thanhalf-a-century, is a revered master in India and the painting is one of hismost ambitious works he has ever created as homage to his homeland,” Mehtasaid.

“Its size, scale, and expressive brushstrokes radiate thebrilliant colours of India and has a deeply spiritual subtext. In this onework, the artist has worked through all of the themes of his long and variedcareer and serves as the shining example of one of the best works in this fieldto come to auction.”

The value depended on “the size of the painting, the palate,where it fits into the artist’s oeuvre”, Mehta explained.

She also described Jamini Roy’s depiction of sunset over theHooghly, valued at £5,000 to £7,000, as “a very nice work, very charming. Itwas bought by an Italian diplomat who met (Roberto) Rosselini, when he wasfilming in India (and did a bunk with a Bengali housewife, Sonali Das Gupta).So there are stories attached to these paintings”.

Raza’s Saurashtra, painted in 1983, comes from a Frenchcollector who acquired it directly from the artist.

Whenever Raza is asked about what inspires him, he comes outwith the same answer: “I have never left India. I love my country and I amproud of it.”

On who is likely to spend over a million pounds on acquiring theRaza masterpiece or indeed any of the other works in the auctions, Mehtaspeculated: “It’s so iconic it could go just about anywhere. We have sent 3,500catalogues all over the world. It could go to an NRI or someone in India. Thepurchasing power of Indians has gone up a lot, we have noticed.”

In London, revealed Mehta, “we have Lakshmi Mittal’s wife (Usha)who is on the board of Christie’s holding private events.”

The Purple Wall curated by Gayatri Sinha was a fantatic project showcasing the best of Indian Contemporary Art.

The participating artists were:

Subodh Gupta,Nataraj Sharma, Mithu Sen, Ranbir Kaleka, T.V. Santosh, Riyas Komu, Bharat Sikka, Ravi Aggarwal, Richard Bartholomeo, Asma Mudrawala, Manjunath Kamat, Neha Choksi, Subba Ghosh.

 

A new concept of Indian-ness
Book now for Lecture series "Discover India" No.2

No.2 "Dhoom!India: Thinking about the cool youth of today"
*Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation.
 
Along with religion, philosophy and traditional forms of lifestyle, the new faces of India
– information technology, the stock market, low-cost cars, biotechnology – are impressing
people the world over. Now these new concepts of "Indian-ness" are inspiring a
contemporary culture that is fresh and cool. We explore fashionable Indian society and
culture, from film and literature to the spiritual realm and contemporary art.
Chalo! Dhoom India (Let's go to cool India!).

Date:19:00-21:00 Friday, 23 January, 2009
Lecturer:Sekiguchi Mari (Modern Indian Studies, Asia University, editor “India Tsushin”)
Venue: Auditorium, Academyhills 49, Mori Tower 49F
Organizers: Mori Art Museum, Academyhills
Capacity: 150 (bookings required)
Admission: Adult:1,000 yen Student & MAMC Member 500 yen

“Chalo” is Hindi for "Let's go." With the words "Chalo! India" (Let's go! India), we invite you to discover an explosion of creativity and vitality in Indian contemporary art. "Chalo! India" will take you on a journey through more than 100 works by 27 artists and artist groups from all over India. Encompassing a broad range of media, including painting, sculpture, photography and installation, this exhibition examines the latest movements in Indian contemporary art.

Following independence from Britain in 1947, Indian artists began exploring new forms of artistic expressions—drawing inspiration and ideas from Western modernism, and India's own distinctive culture. Over the next 60 years, new types of work that powerfully embodied political and social critiques emerged. More recently, Indian artists have been making works that respond to urbanization and changing contemporary lifestyles—art that reflects the rapid economic development, and globalization that has taken hold since the 1990s. Today the lively Indian art scene is spreading its wings both at home and abroad, and has been attracting a great deal of international attention.

"Chalo! India" is a significant survey of new Indian art, including a sociological research project involving architects and intellectuals, and state of the art interactive media work—as befits an IT giant such as India. Most people see India in terms of its rich and influential history, its Gods and devotion, Bollywood movies, or its awakening as an economic giant. However, there is so much more to the complex and dynamic India of today. “Chalo! India” explores and celebrates the depth of this country; the contradictions of its society, the dreams and hopes of its people, and its energy and passion toward the future.

Participating Artist

A. Balasubramaniam	N. S. Harsha
Sarnath Banerjee	Pushpamala N.
Krishnaraj Chonat	Jagannath Panda
Nikhil Chopra	Justin Ponmany
Atul Dodiya	Ashim Purkayastha
Shilpa Gupta	Raqs Media Collective
Subodh Gupta	Gigi Scaria
Tushar Joag	Nataraj Sharma
Anant Joshi	Gulammohammed Sheikh
Ranbir Kaleka	Kiran Subbaiah
Jitish Kallat	Vivan Sundaram
Reena Saini Kallat	Thukral & Tagra
Bharti Kher	Hema Upadhyay
Prabhavathi Meppayil

For more information visit http://www.mori.art.museum/english/contents/india/index.html

 

Adel Abdessemed - 2008

LONDON.- The sixth edition of the leading international contemporary art fair is sponsored by Deutsche Bank and takes place in London from 16-19 October 2008. 151 of the world’s most exciting contemporary art galleries, representing 27 countries, will present new work by over 1,000 artists at Frieze Art Fair. 2008 will see 11 galleries exhibiting at Frieze Art Fair for the first time, including Juliètte Jongma from Amsterdam, Long March Space, Beijing, Mary Mary, Glasgow and Vermelho, Sao Paulo. Taking place in the beautiful setting of Regent’s Park in a large temporary structure of over 200,000 square foot, Frieze Art Fair 2008 is designed by renowned architects Caruso St John. Four galleries – Annet Gelink, Hauser & Wirth, Taka Ishii and Timothy Taylor have all employed architects to design their stands. Each year the fair’s organisers invite two spaces from developing centres of art to the fair, in 2008 they are Appetite from Buenos Aires and PiST from Istanbul. Eleven artists have been commissioned to create site-specific work for Frieze Art Fair 2008. This year’s Frieze Projects engage directly with the ecology of the fair and its surroundings. Working closely with Caruso St. John, Jeppe Hein has drawn together the artificial construction of the fair with the natural surroundings of the park in an installation of subtly animated trees outside the entrance to the fair. Norma Jeane will present three transparent booths for visitors of the fair to smoke in. Each smoker will be part of the performance which is a comment on how the once social activity of smoking has been transformed through regulation and legislation into something deeply anti-social. Agnieszka Kurant will present a trio of trained parrots that have been taught to use an alternative language. Cory Arcangel has intervened in the fair’s gallery selection process, giving one gallery unsuccessful in their application to this year’s fair the opportunity nonetheless to exhibit. Tue Greenfort will excavate a chamber between gallery stands presenting an installation that is both a space to relax in and – literally – a distillation of the essence of the visitors to the fair, with dehumidifiers imperceptibly extracting the moisture from those who enter. Further projects from Pavel Büchler, Ceal Floyer, Sharon Hayes, Bert Rodriguez, Allen Ruppersberg and Andreas Slominski are presented throughout the fair. This year’s European Partners are MUSAC from Spain who will provide the fair’s own mobile phone ringtone and Kling and Bang from Iceland who will reconstruct Rejkavik’s famous Sirkus bar, a favourite with artists and musicians, within the fair. Icelandic beer will be served. Frieze Projects are curated by Neville Wakefield and presented in association with Cartier. Boris Groys, Carsten Höller, Yoko Ono, Raqs Media Collective and Cosey Fanni Tutti are all part of the international line-up of artists, philosophers, writers and cultural commentators taking part in the richly diverse programme of Frieze Talks 2008 which is curated for the first time by the Co-Editors of frieze Jennifer Higgie and Jörg Heiser and Associate Editor, Dan Fox. This year’s panels, conversations and keynote lectures will discuss, illustrate, perform and argue some of the myriad issues prevailing in the world of art and visual culture today. Cuban artist Wilfredo Prieto is the winner of the 2008 Cartier Award. For the fair this year Prieto’s commission is a classic red carpet, the sort associated with wealth and fame, which will trace a route through the fair that anyone can follow until it leads out and up to join the top of a very tall flagpole. The piece is partly a gestural act that draws a line from the insider world of the art fair to the outside. The Cartier Award is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading art awards. For Frieze Art Fair 2008, Frieze Film presents four films created on YouTube. An experiment in film-making, each three minute film is created out of elements from hundreds of contributions to an open submission call for films inspired by the themes of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel "The Road". Each film draws on different strands - the destructive apocalypse, the father son relationship, the bleak landscape and the road itself. The soundtracks are provided by underground bands such as Sunn O))) and A Silver Mt. Zion. Each movie will be broadcast on Channel 4 in the admired 3 Minute Wonder slot from Monday 13 – Thursday 16 October. This year the Sculpture Park at Frieze Art Fair has almost doubled in size, with sixteen sculptures on show in Regents’ Park’s English Gardens. Artists presenting work at the 2008 Sculpture Park include Americans Robert Melee and Michael Craig-Martin, Indian artist Subodh Gupta, Ugo Rondinone from Switzerland, Norwegian artist Gardar Eide Einarsson and British artist Harland Miller. Other highlights will include work by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary and Ângela Ferreira, an artist who was born in Mozambique but now lives and works in Portugal. For the first time sponsorship by the Heath Lambert Group, incorporating Blackwall Green, has provided bursaries enabling innovative and diverse proposals by some participating galleries that may not otherwise have been realised. Frieze Education, which takes place annually in the Deutsche Bank Education Space within Frieze Art Fair, will work with ReachOutRCA (The Royal College of Art’s Educational Outreach Team) for the first time in 2008 to realise its artist-led programme of events for children and young people. Aimed at 5-12 year olds, the weekend workshops and an activity guide inspired by the Frieze Projects programme are both free.

 

LONDON.- Including a whole new body of work that covers the complete range of Hirst’s output and more, the auction will run over two days,commencing with an Evening Sale on Monday, 15 September, and continuing throughout the following day (Tuesday, 16 September) with a morning and afternoon session. The two day sale, which will include 223 lots, is expected to realise a sum in excess of £65 million. Estimates will range from around £15,000-20,000 (for a range of new drawings) up to the £8,000,000-12,000,000 estimate attached to The Golden Calf –the monumental and arresting centre-piece of the sale. Among the works to be offered will be new and exciting variations on many of the key themes that have defined Hirst’s work to date.

damien hirst said: “After the success of the Pharmacy auction, I always felt I would like to do another auction. It’s a very democratic way to sell art and it feels like a natural evolution for contemporary art. Although there is risk involved, I embrace the challenge of selling my work in this way. I never want to stop working with my galleries. This is different. The world’s changing, ultimately I need to see where this road leads.”

Formaldehyde ormaldehyde sculptures which have never been seen in public before:

The Golden Calf (lot 13, Evening Sale)
calf, 18 carat gold, glass, goldplated steel, silicone and
formaldehyde solution with Carrara marble plinth
398.9 by 350.5 by 167.6cm
executed in 2008
£ 8,000,000-12,000,000
€ 10,120,000-15,180,000
US$ 15,800,000-23,690,000

The Kingdom (lot 5, Evening sale)
tiger shark, glass, steel, silicone and formaldehyde
solution with steel plinth
214 by 383.6 by 141.8cm.
executed in 2008
£ 4,000,000 - 6,000,000
€ 5,060,000-7,590,000
US$ 7,900,000-11,850,000

The Dream (lot 110, Morning Sale)
foal, glass, steel, resin, silicone and formaldehyde solution
231 by 332.6 by 138.1cm.
executed in 2008
£ 2,000,000-3,000,000
€ 2,530,000-3,800,000
US$ 3,950,000-5,930,000

The Incredible Journey (lot 211, Afternoon Sale)
zebra, glass, steel, silicone, and formaldehyde solution
208.6 by 322.5 by 108.8cm
executed in 2008
£ 2,000,000-3,000,000
€ 2,530,000-3,800,000
US$ 3,950,000-5,930,000

Gold
Gold features strongly in the sale, for which Hirst has produced a glittering range of new works:

Aurothioglucose (lot 7, Evening Sale)
household gloss and enamel
paint on canvas
172.7 by 274.3cm.
executed in 2008
£ 400,000-600,000
€ 510,000-760,000
US$ 790,000-1,190,000

Memories of / Moments With You
(lot 11, Evening Sale)
gold-plated steel and glass with
manufactured diamonds, diptych
91 by 137.2 by 10cm.;
executed in 2008
£800,000-1,200,000
€ 1,020,000-1,520,000 

HELSINKI.- The Ateneum Art Museum presents today Hokusai and Hiroshige, on view through December 7, 2008. This exhibition comes from Japan. It presents coloured woodcuts by Hokusai (1760–1849) and Hiroshige (1797–1858), two of the best known landscape artists of the Edo period, from the 1830s to the 1850s. All the two hundred works featured in the exhibition come from the Yasusaburo Hara Collection in Tokyo, on loan outside Japan for the first time ever. The most famous work on display will be Hokusai's The Great Wave (ca. 1831) which has become one of the icons of Japanese art. The exhibition is curated by Ateneum Art Museum's Chief Curator Heikki Malme.

The exhibition Hokusai & Hiroshige. On a Journey to Edo takes visitors on a journey from Kyoto to Edo (present-day Tokyo). There were two roads between these cities, the Tokaido and Kisokaido. Hiroshige has depicted landscapes along these roads in his series The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tokaido Road (c. 1831–34) and The Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kisokaido Road (c. 1834–42), while Hokusai's most famous series presents Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (c. 1830–35). Japan's sacred mountain Fuji as well as the landscapes and nature along the two roads also feature in the exhibition design and architecture, taking the visitor through different seasons and weather towards Edo and the bustle of the city. One of the exhibition rooms is reserved for works from Hiroshige's series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (c. 1856–58).

The woodcuts of Hokusai and Hiroshige were an inspiration to Finnish Golden Age artists in turn-of-the-century Paris, and now they are exhibited for the first time in this scale in Finland. All the nearly 200 works in the exhibition come from the Yasusaburo Hara Collection in Tokyo. This collection is exceptional, for it comprises complete sets of all those series from which the works now seen in Ateneum have been selected. Being sensitive to light and only allowed on display for a certain period of time, another set of woodcuts with the same themes will be exhibited from 21 October onwards. The gems of the selection, Hokusai's The Great Wave, Red Fuji and Thundershower beneath the Summit (series c. 1830–35), however, are on view throughout the exhibition.

The last room in the exhibition presents Japanese tools and the making of woodcuts. One of the few master block-cutters of our time, Shoichi Kitamura will give a demonstration in a woodcut workshop set up in the exhibition room on Ateneum's events day on 4 October.

There is a 192-page, richly illustrated catalogue published to complement the exhibition, with articles on the life and work of Hokusai and Hiroshige as well as the development of the Japanese woodcut and its production process. Many of the works featured in the exhibition are presented with pictures. The catalogue is edited by Heikki Malme, and it will be available from Ateneum's bookshop and web shop.

Whenever someone wants to see if an artwork is 'real', the first gesture is to look at its back or at it's base; the part of it that normally isn't visible to anyone else but experts, dealers, museum conservators or the artists' themselves. This happens because while the image's objective is to remain eternally the same, its support is constantly changing, telling its story, showing its scars, its labels and periodic clichés. So when a cousin of mine told me his 7-year old could paint a Picasso, I told him 'probably, but he couldn't do the back'. As a teenager, I used to fix the neighbor's TV as a hobby. I wanted to learn how to fix clocks too. Whenever something's function is basically visual, there is always an opening in the back for the curious to do it damage.

                                                                  -Vik Muniz in an unpublished interview, 2005

For over 20 years Muniz has consistently defined art as a subtle connection between mind and matter by recreating iconic images while simultaneously revealing and debasing the process of their making. While keeping within the conceptual frameworks of Muniz's previously established images, Verso marks a return to the object-making that first brought him attention in the late 1980s.

Verso consists of a group of 3-dimensional trompe-l'oeils of the actual backs of such iconic works as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Van Gogh's Starry Night and Seurat's La Grande Jatte that, over a period of six years, Muniz photographed and systematically studied in partnership with the curatorial and conservation departments of MOMA, the Guggenheim and the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as with a team of dedicated craftsman, artists, forgers, and technicians. These are disconcertingly faithful reproductions in a 1:1 scale realized in an inch-by-inch process that did not spare the slightest detail. Every scratch, dent or scribble is physically reproduced to photographic precision. Authentic looking labels, worn-away tape, faded pencil notations and actual period hardware and carpentry make it hard even for an expert to disbelieve they are seeing the actual backs of these masterpieces.

Along with Verso, Muniz will be exhibiting equally confounding recreations of the backs of famous photographs from the New York Times archive at MOMA. The backs are full of cancelled dates, yellowed newspaper captions and rubber cement stains.

Vik Muniz will be curating an artist's choice exhibition at MOMA this December. His retrospective, organized by the Miami Art Museum in 2006, is currently on view in Mexico City at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso. His work is in the collection of many museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre George Pompidou, the Centro Cultural Reina Sofia, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Muniz was born in Brazil and currently lives and works in Brazil and Brooklyn.

 

The outcome of Sotheby's auction of new works by Damien Hirst is crucial to the overall confidence of the contemporary art market, according to a report published yesterday by the research company ArtTactic.

The research was compiled by the London-based company's founder, Anders Petterson, before the "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" sale of material from Mr. Hirst's studio, which Sotheby's expects to fetch at least $117 million.

Mr. Petterson examined how Mr. Hirst's works have performed at auction over the last four years since Sotheby's October 2004 "Pharmacy" sale. That auction of the contents of the artist's defunct Notting Hill restaurant made $19.8 million, more than double the $8.74 million top estimate.

According to ArtTactic's report, if Sotheby's 223-lot sale in London on September 15 and 16 raises $150 million, it will match the total achieved from all of Mr. Hirst's auction sales between 2000 and 2008. If it performs below expectations, it could "signal a wider contemporary art market in decline," the report said.

"It's a very important event," Petterson said in a telephone interview. "It will set the tone for the autumn season of contemporary auctions and potentially further than that."

ArtTactic predicted that the Hirst sale would perform well. In a poll it conducted among 51 market insiders, 78% felt the total would fall within Sotheby's estimate range, said the report.

"I'd be surprised if Sotheby's didn't sell at least 85% of the lots," the New York-based art adviser Todd Levin, director of the Levin Art Group, said in a telephone interview, when asked to comment on the report.

Since October 2004, the auction market for Mr. Hirst's work has seen an increase in average prices of 207% (or a 39% annual compound return), said the ArtTactic report. In June 2007, Sotheby's London sold Mr. Hirst's "Lullaby Spring" for a record $17.3 million with fees to the Emir of Qatar, said the Art Newspaper.

Last week, Sotheby's courted new international buyers for Mr. Hirst's work by holding VIP previews for the sale in the Hamptons and New Delhi. The artist himself did not attend either of these events.

ArtTactic said that the August 23 report in the Art Newspaper stating that Mr. Hirst's dealer, White Cube, was holding more than 200 unsold works in stock has the potential to upset his market. White Cube, in an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg News on August 26, denied that it had a "mountain" of unsold material.

"Hirst would do himself a favor in the long-term," the report said, "by being transparent about his level of production. Keeping the market in the dark will only undermine the future confidence in his market."