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Buy a flat and get a painting free
In what could be the most artistic of all freebies, a construction firm in Delhi has come up with a “creative” scheme: buy an apartment, get a painting free. A report by Rahul Karmakar.
Real estate is concrete business. It is also a statement on canvas.
In what could be the most artistic of all freebies, a construction firm here has come up with a “creative” scheme: buy an apartment, get a painting free. The art-meets-concrete-blocks concept, the builders say, serves two purposes, besides adding value to their apartments. It provides a captive market for struggling, nameless artists while making each flat owner a prospective investor in art.
“Who knows, a piece of art that a flat owner gets free today might fetch a fortune tomorrow if the artist goes on to make a name for himself,” engineer-builder Utpal Kumar Das told the Hindustan Times. “And, the money he makes might encourage him to buy more art from a fresh breed of nameless artists.”
Das is a partner of Meghmallar Estates and Services Private Limited, one of the pioneers in real estate in the Northeast over a decade ago.
The paintings — sculptures too are an option — that the firm has chosen range from a digital-brushstroke hybrid to oil on canvas. While the hybrid with a market price of Rs 10-15,000 would be tagged with standard flats, conventional canvases costing Rs 25,000 or above are likely to be packaged with luxury apartments.
The freebie concept was born earlier this month in a 3,500 sq ft industrial shed that Das operates to make electrical control panels. Das transformed a part of the shed into an art gallery after fellow engineer-innovator Sanjib Sabhapandit and artist Anup Hazarika came up with Canvascope — a thematic series of individual paintings with a frame-by-frame continuity.
