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Parag Sonarghare, Untitled (2025) Acrylic on canvas. These works, both hyperrealist paintings mapping the body, follow the artist's preoccupation with skin, labour, ageing and conventional ideas of worth and beauty. (Courtesy: Gallery Maskara) |
In 1972, when John Berger took a scalpel to Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli’s ‘Venus and Mars’, his viewers would certainly have experienced a few moments of deep, roiling horror at the desecration of the much feted 1485 painting depicting the Roman goddess of love and the god of war in post-coital bliss. Berger was being, as millennials like to put it, so meta. The opening shot of Ways of Seeing, a BBC miniseries that Berger later adapted into a book of the same name — which remains in print even today — was shot in a studio. The painting was a print. And the gesture was symbolic of Berger’s argument: critics deliberately mystify art to control how we see it. We see culture based on what we’re taught to see. Berger reminded us that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” So the next time you step into an art gallery or watch a piece of cinema, allow yourself to question what you know. If you’re in Mumbai next week, you can put this piece of advice to use immediately. A major retrospective of Tyeb Mehta, one of the founding members of the Progressive Artists Group, and the first Modernist to break the million-dollar ceiling at an auction in 2005, will be held at the third iteration of Art Mumbai that is slated to take place between November 13 and 16. Eighty two national and international galleries will participate in the fair — a 60% jump from the previous year’s participant list — and the programming includes a series of talks around South Asian patronage, curatorial visions from Dubai, Sharjah, Doha, and Riyadh, and the fundamentals of the art market to help collectors build and sustain long-term investments. “It’s important to understand the value of art,” said Minal Vazirani, co-founder of Art Mumbai, and co-founder and president of Saffron Art, a Mumbai-headquartered auction house. Mehta’s retrospective will bring around 40 works by the artist, who, if he were alive, would have turned 100 this year. [This doesn’t seem so implausible given that July 5, 2025 also marked the 100th birthday of Mehta’s friend and fellow PAG member, Krishen Khanna]. Though none of the works are on sale — all are on loan from private and museum collections — seeing them in one place will offer the viewers an insight into how the artist saw the world. “What I find particularly poignant and poetic about the artist is how he captured the moment before a terrible tragedy or incident,” Vazirani said, referring to the trussed bull and falling figure, common tropes in some of his works. The retrospective, she said, will “hopefully, give us pause to stop and think, reexamine ourselves and our situations, is critical for us to learn and develop our way of thinking.” A fair is not just a commercial event. It’s an opportunity for the art ecosystem to teach the public how to see, and crucially, what to see. |
Tyeb Mehta, Mahisasura, 2001, Acrylic on canvas. (Courtesy: Vadehra Art Gallery website) |
At the start of the year, Hindustan Times broke the news that the India Art Fair (IAF), now in its 16th year, will hold a concise format commercial event in Hyderabad in a bid to expand its footprint in cities beyond Delhi and Mumbai, the twin art capitals of the country. On the November 1 weekend, the IAF EDI+IONS Hyderabad brought 11 galleries and design studios from around the country to a non-gallery venue in the city. “We were very keen to hold a commercial activity in the South, decentralise art from the Delhi-Mumbai circuit, and of course, tap into a new collector and art patron community. In emerging markets, whether it is Hyderabad, Bengaluru or Chennai, the goal really should be long-term ecosystem and audience development, rather than anything immediate,” said Jaya Asokan, who has stewarded the IAF since 2021. Asokan called the exhibition-style event “a proof of concept to see what the market responds to,” but here’s why it matters: It is an exercise in teaching collectors on new ways of seeing. The event brought galleries with significant rosters of contemporary artists to Hyderabad. For instance, Kolkata-based Experimenter showcased works by the deceased printmaker Krishna Reddy; Delhi-based Vadehra gallery showed young artist Biraaj Dodiya, as well as her more renowned parents, Atul and Anju; and Mumbai-based Gallery Maskara took T Venkanna and Parag Sonarghare, among others. In keeping with the IAF’s recent pivot towards design, studios like Aequo and Atelier Ashiesh Shah were also part of the exhibition. For a city with only a small clutch of commercial or private art galleries, but one of the top five cities where dollar–millionnaires reside in the country, developing an art market is synonymous with developing taste. Three Hyderabad galleries, including Kalakriti — run by Rekha Lahoti, whose husband Prashant, owns one of the largest private map collections (dating back to the 15th century) in the country — also participated in the IAF event. Lahoti said that Hyderabad is a good market because of its large expatriate and Non-Resident Indian (NRI) community. But her battle has been to get an audience to enter her gallery. “Since 2002, we have done our very best to grow the art community, through student scholarships and an annual art festival that Covid put a halt to. We strove to bring more people into the gallery. Budgets and prices matter, so we began to focus on emerging artists, too.” Variety, after all, is cause for gaze. |
Kurma | The Tortoise, a limited edition sculpture by Vikram Goyal, with a hidden repoussé panel depicting a Panchatantra fable. The piece, from 'The New Fable: The Soul Garden' collection was displayed at Design Miami/Paris that concluded on October 26. (Photo Credit | Ali Monis Naqvi/ Courtesy: Vikram Goyal Studio) |
Vocal for global Vikram Goyal is invested in how the international collectable design community views Indian makers. The former BITS Pilani engineering graduate-turned New York banker-turned blue-eyed boy of the Paris-London-Milan dealer circuit made his debut at the Design Paris/Miami which concluded on October 26. The previous week, he showcased at PAD London with Nina Yasher, the owner of Milan-based Nilufer Gallery, a compulsory pitstop for globe-trotting billionaires. He is also represented by US-based The Future Perfect, and has collaborated with design houses like de Gourney and artists like Sissel Tolaas, whose olfactory laboratory does cutting-edge work with smells. Goyal’s foray into the world of design began when he co-founded Kama Ayurveda in 2000; his vision firmly planted in a heritage that could be marketed to a recently liberalized middle-class consumer. The sensibility of the Indian collector is distinct from that of collectors abroad, he said. “And while you want to be true to yourself, you also want to, kind of, demonstrate that you can also speak an international language without compromising your own design aesthetic, which is what we've been trying to do in terms of finishes and looks,” he said. For Design Miami/Paris, Goyal’s the animals sculpted out of beaten metal and made with patinated surfaces and hollowed joinery, double up as coffee tables, benches, and stools and include panels of repoussé (“it has a rich history of usage in decorative arts in temples, palaces and in vessels”), albeit in hidden panels. “This kind of materiality and design has allowed me to penetrate these very tight circles of design galleries internationally,” Goyal said. |
A pair of Meiji-period Japanese Satsuma floor vases, painted in polychrome enamels and gilt from the estate of Mangaldas Nathubhai, sold for Rs 2.2 lakh at a recent auction. (Photo credit: Prinseps) |
Old tactics The work of teaching us how to see is never done. A recently-concluded public sale by Mumbai-based auction house Prinseps can teach us a thing or two about how collectors go about learning how to see. A large swathe of the estate built by Mangaldas Nathubhai, one of 19th century Bombay’s merchant princes, went up for sale in September, and over the course of two months, has garnered close to Rs 52.56 lakh. The sale of 53 lots of rare and old books, which included Rupavali, an instruction manual on traditional Indian art forms and iconography (1939) by Nandlal Bose, the Santiniketan artist who went on to illustrate in the Indian Constitution a decade later, fetched a tidy sum of Rs 22.36 lakh. The porcelain collection, comprising 38 lots of vases, cups and saucers, statues from China and Japan, including Satsuma vases (still a collector’s favourite), fetched Rs 15.51 lakh, while 18 lots of clocks and timepieces, including one with the mark of French clock movement maker Japy Frères, sold for Rs 8.91 lakh. Two more sales from the estate are slated to come up — one, a coin collection dating back to the Delhi Sultanate period, and another of silverware. Indrajit Chatterjee, the founder of Prinseps, pointed to the presence of books in the estate’s collection on porcelain, artefacts and other aspects of high European taste. It shows us that the collectors studied before they bought anything, he said. There is a lesson in there that echoes through time: Even 150 years ago, collectors were teaching themselves ways of seeing. |
Written by Dhamini Ratnam. Produced by Shad Hasnain |
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