DIGITAL COPY ON MAGZTERIndian art aficionado does not remember the hoopla that
accompanied the Art Today Hussain opening where he
painted a live horse in Connaught Place, the frenzied
paparazzi crush, the socialites killing for invitations to
the event?! The Nineties economic boom, fuelled by the
Narasimha Rao/Manmohan duo’s liberalisation policies
caused a veritable bull run in most sectors including art.
In a first, Delhi entrepreneurs, flush with new money;
builders/business magnates, upwardly mobile professionals
looking to park their money, project their ‘we’ve arrived’
status, enthusiastically bought up art as both trophy and
investment.
It was, however, the most unlikely happenstance that
catapulted Delhi on to the international art centrestage.
Come 1993, a young American painter/curator Peter Nagy
came to live in Delhi. In a previous trip in 1992 he’d spent
eight weeks in Baroda, Ahmedabad, had an immersive
Indian contemporary art experience, befriending painter
Bhupen Khakhar whose house he laughingly recalls, was
‘Party Central’ where he met Gulammohammed Sheikh,
Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Rekha Rodwittiya, Nataraj
Sharma, Alex Mathews, Shibu Natesan; he pored over
books in the MS University Art Faculty library, read up each
catalogue in Bhupen’s extensive collection, travelled to the
Kanoria Art Centre in Ahmedabad where he befriended
Jeram Patel, Himmat Shah. Enraptured by India ‘... so
exotic! What was there not to like?’ he asks rhetorically,
intrigued by the sheer energy and range of contemporary
Indian art practice, he decided to move. To Delhi. Where
he bumped into photographer Dayanita Singh, artist/critic
couple Vivan Sundaram and Geeta Kapur, struggling artists-
in- a-West-Delhi-DDA-flat-with-balcony- as-studio Subodh
Gupta and Bharti Kher, Sheila Makhijani, et al. What he
saw of their work excited him. Hugely. As excited as he was
when seeing Jitish Kallat’s first show in Bombay around
the same time. ‘It wasn't the shock of the new. It was the
shock of the familiar! I was surprised and excited to come
to the other side of the world and walk into a gallery and
find a very young artist (he was barely 22 then) from India
and making a type of art that, to me, took all those things
we’d been working with in New York in the 1980s: a sort of
New York expressionism but also appropriation, East village
graffiti, the picture school, identity politics... and fusing all
those things together with a very Indian language. He wasn’t
taking it and trying to look like a New Yorker. It was steeped
in India, it’s culture, feel, ethos. To me, that was exciting: to
see stuff we’d been chewing on in New York and making art‘Diplomats contributed hugely to the growth of
the art scene in Delhi,’ recalls doyen Uma Jain
whose late husband Ravi Jain founded one of
Delhi’s first galleries – Dhoomimal. ‘Paramjit was
always a hot sell. The Germans loved
J Swaminathan. Diplomats were frequent visitors
and enthusiastic buyers: Indian painters were
immensely talented and the work was very cheaply
priced compared to European work. A large work
would be pegged at Rs 2000 as opposed to the
2000/3000 dollars a diplomat would pay for a
work of comparable size and artistic quality in
Europe.’
Indeed, the spirited intellectual and artistic
debates between Swaminathan and the Swiss
Ambassador during the Seventies as also with
the legendary art buff, poet and Mexican envoy
Octavio Paz are the stuff of Indian contemporary
art folklore!
The Nineties saw the emergence of the serious
galleries: Espace, Vadehra, Art Inc and Art Today,
among others. Which Indian contemporary
Yaksha/Yakshi, Ramkinkar Baij,
Outside Reserve Bank of India,
New Delhi, Image Courtesy of
J Gupta/Outlook imagesIAF - Delhi Connecting Art/ FEB 2016 - MAR 2016 / ARTS ILLUSTRATED /^43