SH Raza, Akbar Padamsee: Indian masters' works go under the hammer at Christie's annual art sale

Art lovers and collectors in the city have a big reason to rejoice. One of the world’s most-sought-after auction houses, Christie’s, is back with its annual India Sale on 18 December at The Taj Mahal Palace, Mumbai. This year, the auction will offer 150 lots of Indian Classical and Contemporary art with 70 lots of classical art, a category that was introduced last year at Christie’s Mumbai auction. Works by masters of Indian art like Syed Haider Raza, Akbar Padamsee, Bhupen Khakhar and Jehangir Sabavala will go under the hammer at the auction. [caption id=“attachment_3159936” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  (L) artwork by Bhupen Khakhar; (R) Ganesh Pyne[/caption] This year’s auction will be led by Bengaluru-based couple Abhishek and Radhika Poddar, celebrated for their comprehensive collections of modern and contemporary art, antiquities, folk and tribal art, textiles, craft, design and photography. The duo has been putting this exhaustive collection for the last 30 years. Christie’s will be offering 41 lots from their collection, some of which includes works by eminent artists like Tyeb Mehta, Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, Ganesh Pyne, Meera Mukherjee and Bhupen Khakhar, among others. [caption id=“attachment_3159940” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  (L) artwork by Jogen Chowdhury; (R) artwork by Tyeb Mehta[/caption] Here is a sneak peek at some of the artists and their famous works that will go under the hammer this Sunday: Jehangir Sabavala (1922-2011): The landscapes created by Sabavala are intuitive and timeless. Paintings like Under the shadow of…IV, part of a series of works that the artist undertook in the late 1980s, are carefully planned and constructed based on meticulous linear schema and highly nuanced colour plans comprising several minutely graded ‘broken tones’. In this mysteriously titled series of works, the interplay between light and shadow is particularly important and is based on a lifetime’s study of natural Indian light without resort to banal naturalism (estimate: Rs 1,80,00,000-2,50,00,000). Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003): His work has just been exhibited in a comprehensive exhibition at Tate Modern in London, and is represented in the auction with a work of art dating from the artist’s late career. In this work on paper, Khakhar returns to the seascapes and fishing communities that have found place in his work since the 1970s. This particular panorama, painted in 2002, is inspired by the coastal district of Ratnagiri in Maharashtra. (estimate: Rs 70,00,000-90,00,000). Akbar Padamsee’s (b. 1928) series of Metascapes, begun in the early 1970s, represent the artist’s long, unique involvement with the genre of landscape. As the word Metascape suggests, in these paintings Padamsee is concerned with the mythic or archetypal landscape, which is expressed visually by a stringent ordering of timeless elements, such as the earth, the sun and the moon, in temporal space. This large canvas from 1973, with its deep crimson horizon, is one of the earliest metascapes painted by Padamsee (estimate: Rs 1,50,00,000-2,00,00,000).