E-Paper
Manjeet Bawa’s oil-on-canvas sold for Rs7.8 crore, a record for the artist
The sale was part of auction house AstaGuru’s 10th anniversary online sale held over Monday and Tuesday. The battle for this work went beyond the stipulated closing time for the auction.
What happens when two buyers get into a battle of bids for an artwork? They could end up creating a record for the artist.
That’s what happened with renowned artist Manjit Bawa’s untitled oil-on-canvas, created in 2000, depicting Vishnu reclining on a bed of snakes with a beast in the background. Expected to fetch about ₹3.5 crore, it eventually went for a whopping ₹7.78 crore, creating a new world record for the artist. (His previous record was ₹5 crore, for a 1998 untitled Krishna and cow painting auctioned by Christie’s in New York last year.)
The sale was part of auction house AstaGuru’s 10th anniversary online sale held over Monday and Tuesday. The battle for this work went beyond the stipulated closing time for the auction.
“We never expected that it would sell at this price,” says Tushar Sethi, director of AstaGuru. “The winning bid was placed by a buyer who shuttles between India and London.”
Of the 52 lots by Indian Modernists on the block — including paintings by VS Gaitonde, Tyeb Mehta, SH Raza, FN Souza, MF Husain, Raja Ravi Varma and Jehangir Sabavala — 47 found buyers. The art sale generated ₹89 crore in all.
The top netter was Tyeb Mehta’s 2000 creation from his Bull series, which had a reserve price of ₹18 crore and fetched almost ₹20 crore. Raza’s La Provence Noire (1965) sold for ₹8.21 crore; an untitled VS Gaitonde from 1998 fetched ₹11.5 crore; and Husain’s Ganeshji (1970), depicting the festive aura of the elephant-headed deity with a vibrant colour palette, fetched ₹1.1 crore.
Bikash Bhattacharjee’s work also created a world record for the artist. A painting from his celebrated Doll series — nocturnal landscapes strewn with dolls created in early 1970s in response to political violence in Kolkata at the time — was expected to fetch ₹60 lakh but went for ₹1.27 crore.
Bhattacharjee’s previous record was for Durga in the Morning (1990), which fetched ₹89 lakh at an AstaGuru auction last year.
