NRI artist Tyeb Mehta’s painting Mahisasura fetched a whopping $ 1.1 million at an auction of modern and contemporary South Asian art by the leading global auctioneer Christie’s in New York.The sale — which saw 12 new world auction records yesterday — totalled 10,115,050 dollars, led by Mehta’s Mahisasura, Christie’s said in a statement issued here today. With many of the top-selling works still belonging to the Progressive Movement Artists, the sale was equally driven by extremely strong prices obtained for contemporary artists. Atul Dodiya's place in the artistic pantheon has been firmly taking shape and the result achieved for Three Painters, which at 541,000 dollars more than tripled its pre-sale estimate, only confirms his position as one of South Asia's leading artists, the statement said.In the cutting-edge contemporary field, many prices wildly exceeded pre-sale estimates, including for Rameshwar Broota’s Untitled ($ 265,000); TV Santhosh’s Across and Unresolved Story ($ 217,000); Shibu Natesan’s Montage ($ 157,000), Ravinder Reddy's Untitled ($ 187,000) and Rashid Rana’s extraordinary photo collage A Day in the Life of a Landscape ($ 133,000 ).These results certainly bode well for the Asian Contemporary Art sale in Hong Kong at the end of November which will include a select group of works by Indian and Pakistani artists, the statement said.
