Buy King Khan!

In one of the biggest online art auctions of Indian contemporary art, 140 works by 55 artists will go under the hammer on March 12 and 13 on the Saffron Art website (www.saffronart.com). According to Minal Vazirani, co-founder and director of Saffron Art, the auction is worth between $ 5-7 million.

The auction house last held a similar sale in September 2007, where 115 works of 43 artists worth $ 3.6 million were showcased. Minal says, “Contemporary Indian art has moved up the global ladder simultaneously as India began to be recognised as an emerging economic power. We have so far tapped only a small portion of the worldwide appetite for such kind of art.”

The works on display, for this particular auction, are by well-known artists including Subodh Gupta, Atul Dodiya, Anju Dodiya, Jitish Kallat, Baiju Parthan and Sudarshan Shetty among others. One of the most interesting aspects of the auction is a photographic montage portraying actor Shah Rukh Khan created by Rashid Rana from Pakistan. SRK’s image is formed out of a collage of faces of common people with visible cracks between each. Rana attempts ‘a shift in perspective from the macro to the micro, the global to the local’.

Some time ago, Rana had said, “Shah Rukh Khan is very popular in Pakistan. His hoardings are put up at many places. In fact, people aspire to visit his house in Lahore.” Minal believes this work, estimated to go under the hammer for Rs 6 lakh, will do well in the auction.

The works that are vying for the top three spots in the auction are Atul Dodiya’s Vansha Vriksha—a watercolor, acrylic and marble dust on paper, estimated to go for Rs 68, 40,000; the second place has a tie between Surendra Nair’s Doctrine of the Forest: An Actor at Play (Cuckoonebulopolis) and Shibu Natesan’s Each One Teach One, both estimated to go for Rs 65,00,000. Subodh Gupta’s untitled work is expected to bag the third position.

Riddhi Doshi, DNA India