On January 10, there was yet another confirmation of the opening up of the Indian art scene (income tax raids on galleries notwithstanding) to new horizons. It is the revamping of Delhi?s Gallerie Espace that had started out in 1989 as yet another art gallery inspired by that creator par excellence of India?s art market, MF Husain. True, the Espace, owned by Renu Modi, was slow in pace. Earlier steps in this direction have been taken by the Dhoomimal Art Gallery, the Kumar Gallery, the Delhi Art Gallery, Art Alive and Vadheras, to name only a few of the Capital?s pillars for the sales of art. But it is a step in the right direction that confirms our view that the Indian contemporary art scene is not only alive but well too.
A little before Espace started, a foreign buyer entered the Indian market with Rs 1 crore and gallery owners found it difficult to sop up the largesse with all the stocks at hand. Today, one good work of a leading artist like Tyeb Mehta, FN Souza, SH Raza, MF Husain, Akbar Padamsee or Ram Kumar would mop up that kind of budget in a jiffy. Our contemporary art market has grown more than two hundred fold in the last two decades. Two practitioners from the Progressive Artists Group, MF Husain and Akbar Padamsee, figure in the list of those being exhibited on the 16th birthday bash at the new-look gallery. Others reflect the Group 1890, like J Swaminathan, Himmat Shah and Jeram Patel, in the wake of the anti-communist hysteria that shook the country after the India-China war of 1962. It is significant that though the group attacked politics, one of its founders, Swaminathan, was himself an ex-communist. Our contemporary reality cannot free itself from either a radical agenda or from an original viewpoint distinct from the traditional pulls of the East-West divide. This thrust of radicalism and originality is reflected in most artists included in the exhibition.
Among them, the works of MF Husain, Amit Ambalal, Laxma Goud, Manu Parekh, Jogen Choudhury and Manjit Bawa reflect a pristine radicalism. In fact, Ambalal?s Monkey in a Palanquin portrays a powerful industrial matriarch.
Others reflect different levels of a radical departure from our figurative art. These include the works of Ganesh Haloi, Prabhakar Kolte, Amitava Das, Anant Joshi, Jeram Patel, Zarina Hashmi and Vishwanadhan. The artist in Akbar Padamsee makes a radical departure from his drawings and paintings in the field of photography. Moreover, the exhibition adds an important sculptural dimension to our contemporary art with a ceramic of Mrinalini Mukherjee, metal sculptures of Dhruva Mistry and Himmat Shah, stone, wood and metal works of Nagji Patel and Rajendra Kumar Tiku, a wood sculpture by Karl Antao, and a terracotta relief by Laxma Goud. There is enough in this exhibition to assure us that there is room for the expansion of our art market on many fronts in future.
When the centre-pole of a tent rises higher, its circumference tends to narrow down. So, whatever the promotional activity may be for sculpture and photography, our contemporary oils and acrylics will remain the best investment for some time to come. This is as the scope of their rise in price seems not to be flagging at all. It is time to assess the works of terms of their execution, originality and capacity to harmonise different genres and buy without fear. The bears are still nowhere on the horizon.