With the nose-dive in stocks and shares and the more or less permanent regression one sees in the economies of the world, the art market becomes increasingly attractive to invest in. And there are funds enough for it. Both the speculative activity of the past and the inflation that accompanied it have seen to that. Now we are facing another inflationary upswing, but without the growth in production that ought to go with it, so stocks and shares will lie low and the art market ought to take over that space.

To an extent it already has. Today, in figurative contemporary art, we hold our own in most art centres of the world. Our figurative art is neatly placed between the myriad of Indian folk styles and the radical stylistic influences of artists like Picasso and Bracque. As such it has truly global appeal that is reflected in collections all the way from California to Japan.

Indeed, that is why artists who constitute the firmament of this trend, like MF Husain, Ganesh Pyne, Tyeb Mehta, FN Souza and Akbar Padamsee make for very good investment. Even younger artists like Arpana Caur, Arpita Singh, Atul Sinha and Amitava Das have achieved a set of good niches in the market. Recently I have noted increased interest in the works of Krishen Khanna and Paritosh Sen. Obviously, our modernist figurative artists are the best investment we have in the art market today.

Apart from this strong figurative trend, a number of our non-figurative artists are very good investment too. Leading them, of course, is the work of VS Gaitonde, the most clearly non-figurative of our abstracts artists. Close on his heels we have SH Raza. Then we have Ram Kumar, Ganesh Haloi, Prabhakar Kolte, Shobha Broota and Sohan Quadri, who has just had a very successful show with Sundaram Tagore in New York and another with Kumar Gallery in Delhi. He is one of our best non-figurative artists today.

Untitled abstract by Sangeeta Gupta

The problem with non-figurative art is that people are unsure of it. They feel it is too difficult to understand. The reality is quite the reverse. It is one of the easiest to relate to, as is obvious from the non-figurative tribal wall-paintings and woodcarvings one comes across. True, these works are either stylisation of objects or symbols; but either way their directness and simplicity cannot be denied. Of course, non-figurative art does not refer to any outside object beyond itself as primitive art does, but that is only one step forward and not too difficult to comprehend.

If an unlettered but sensitive tribal can appreciate the aesthetic of abstraction, why not the modern art lover or collector? All one has to do is to understand that non-figurative art asserts its own reality as an aesthetic object. It forces one to think along new lines, exploring space, form, colour, texture and tone in an original manner. If non-figurative art is not original, it is nothing. It is what it is but it is also what has never been done before. If a work of non-figurative art fails on both these counts, it fails altogether.

Today we are lucky to have a number of good non-figurative artists in the field. There is Shinde, whose scrap-heap imagery teems with life. There is Sarab Soni, whose work takes off from Jackson Pollock, with a sense of flow, Nupur Kundu, who has a masterly hold over colour and texture and, the most serious of them, Sangeeta Gupta, whose austere abstracts force one away from the riot of colour to contemplate the qualities of tone and texture.

Gupta, exhibiting at Delhi?s Kumar Gallery, is an artist to be noted in this field. Despite this rich basis for projecting our contemporary non-figurative art, I feel that a more systematic effort can be made to project our abstract artists abroad extensively. But the selection must be careful and discriminating so as to be comparable with international standards. And there is no better time than the present to do it.