Artmeter

Market savvyFUELLED by the new figures in the market, venture capitalist Pravin Gandhi, Sanjay Kumar of Synergy Art Foundation and Geeta Meh...

Hammered
TYEB MEHTA’s Bull, a bronze sculpture, sold for Rs 60 lakh and his painting Mahisasura went under the hammer at the Christie’s auction in New York for a spectacular Rs 6.9 crore. These two sales heralded an unprecedented surge in prices in the Indian art market. New York-based hedge fund manager Rajiv Chaudhuri’s bid made him the owner of the highest priced Indian painting.

Unmatched
FN SOUZA was in the news next. This Progressive artist has done very little work on large canvases, and even fewer have showed up at auctions. At 4-ft by 6-ft, his Lovers is large, and combined with the fact that it was made in the ’50s (his most productive period), the painting sold for Rs 6.5 crore, the highest price for a Souza. It matched eight Husains in the same auction.

Installation bid
A THREE-PART mixed media installation by Atul Dodiya, Earth, Father Lost (VIII), fetched Rs 21.5 lakh at saffronart.com’s May auction, the highest for an installation so far. The 45-year-old artist has used water pipes, crutches, curtains and paints in rolling shutters (shop doors) as peripherals in this work.

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Art mart
ONLINE auction site saffronart.com beat international auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s to achieve a total sales value of Rs 55 crore at a single auction this month. Its founders, Dinesh and Minal Vazirani, held three auctions this year with a total of 390 paintings going under the hammer.

Market savvy
FUELLED by the new figures in the market, venture capitalist Pravin Gandhi, Sanjay Kumar of Synergy Art Foundation and Geeta Mehra of Sakshi Gallery floated India’s first onshore art fund. It’s a four-year, close-ended fund that promises 20 per cent compounded annual rate of growth. Edelweiss Capital has been given the mandate to raise the finances.

Nude statement
ARTIST Chintan Upadhyay raked up a controversy for dressing down to the buff for an installation show titled Baar, baar kitne baar? Har baar… at Vadodara in April this year. Protesting against the 2002 Gujarat riots, the 32-year-old artist sat nude in the lotus position while viewers smeared saffron on him.

Trendsetter
INDIAN art’s most flamboyant figure, MF Husain, crossed another milestone. Having started the trend of making art friendly to investors with his Rs 100 crore deal for a series of 10 paintings, Husain turned 90.

EXCLUSIVE: EC brings in feature to check misuse of identity to seek voter list deletions

Political Pulse2 hr ago

The Election Commission has launched a new 'e-sign' feature on its portal and app to prevent fraud. This comes after allegations of misuse of online voter deletion forms in Karnataka. The feature requires voters to verify their identity using their Aadhaar-linked phone numbers, reducing the possibility of fraud.

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