Auction PR Publicity Announcements News and Information
Auction PR Publicity Announcements News and Information

Saffronart Autumn Online Auction 2009

Saffronart, the world’s largest online auction house, will host the annual Autumn Online Art Auction of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art on September 9-10, 2009. A pioneer of online art auctions, Saffronart, founded in 2000, is a global company with deep Indian roots. With an online presence and offices in Mumbai, New York and London, Saffronart has both broadened and simplified access to Indian art and jewelry, in addition to setting global pricing benchmarks and transforming the landscape of Modern and Contemporary Indian Art. Its robust online auction platform and secure technology offers a personal, intuitive and effortless bidding and buying experience for clients. Responding to the needs of today’s collectors, Saffronart also offers such services as art advisory, private sales, appraisals and valuations, and specialized art storage.
With a total of 95 lots, the upcoming sale will include artworks by 52 leading modern and contemporary Indian artists and will take place online at www.saffronart.com.
Highlighted on the front cover of the catalogue, Akbar Padamsee’s monumental 1995 mirror-image is a mythical landscape, offering the artist’s meditations on time, space and the nature of existence. Among the auction’s contemporary lots, Surendran Nair’s ‘Vertigo’ from his Cuckoonebulopolis suite of works, featured on the back cover of the catalogue, draws the viewer’s attention simultaneously to the idea and the impossibility of a life of isolation in contemporary social contexts. Rooted in the canons of Pop Art and Photorealism, Subodh Gupta’s untitled 2006 canvas packed with gleaming kitchenware is theatrical both in its content and in its epic dimensions. In charting and presenting India’s unique developmental path, Gupta effectively communicates the impossibility of capturing the intricacies of the developing world through a developed-world-lens.

Also included are important works by Manjit Bawa, S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza. While Raza’s epic canvas ‘Sheveta’, executed in an abstinent palette of whites and grays, is a meditation on serenity, infinity and clarity, Souza’s 1957 portrait titled ‘Man with Baked Features in a Black Coat’, is a channel for the artist’s scathing social commentary, frequently centered on the dual issues of sex and religion and pleasure and suffering, which captivated him throughout his career.