Kiran Nadar, one among India’s most essential collectors, has revealed to ARTnews that she was the client of M.F. Husain’s large-scale 1954 portray Untitled (Gram Yatra), which offered for $13.8 million at Christie’s New York.
The work was supplied throughout a South Asian trendy and modern artwork public sale held throughout Asia Artwork Week in New York. It carried a pre-sale estimate of $2.5 million to $3.5 million and is now the most-expensive work of Indian trendy artwork ever offered at public sale.
The work was initially owned by Norwegian surgeon Leon Elias Volodarsky, who acquired it in New Delhi in 1954. His property donated it in 1964 to the Oslo College Hospital, which consigned it to Christie’s. (The deaccessioning course of took 13 years and approval from the hospital’s board.)
Along with her husband, Shiva, Nader has ranked on ARTnews’s Prime 200 Collectors record every year since 2019. The M. F. Husain work joins the greater than 15,000 works the couple already owns, a lot of that are exhibited on the Kiran Nadar Museum of Artwork (KNMA) in Delhi. “M.F. Husain’s magnum opus Untitled (Gram Yatra), 1954, is a landmark acquisition for the museum’s assortment,” she advised ARTnews.
This isn’t the primary time they’ve bought document breaking works of Indian trendy artwork. In addition they scooped up S.H. Raza’s Saurashtra (1983) for £2.39 million (about $3.51 million on the time) in 2010, and F. N. Souza’s Beginning (1955) for $4.09 million in 2015.
The KNMA quickly gained’t be the one place to see main works by Husain. In November, Lawh Wa Qalam: M.F. Husain Museum will open in Doha, Qatar. Spearheaded by the Qatar Basis, the forthcoming 32,300-square-foot museum is predicated on a drawing by Husain, who was an Emirati citizen.
Measuring almost 14-feet-long, the portray contains 13 vignettes of on a regular basis life in India. Painted 5 years after Indian independence, Nadar stated that “this epic panorama represents not solely the biggest work from Husain’s Fifties oeuvre however arguably his most important inventive assertion of the last decade, exemplifying the function of artwork as an instrument of nation-building. The work displays India’s deep historic roots, its evolving future, and Husain’s dialogue with worldwide modernism because the visible chronicler of post-independence India, making this acquisition profoundly vital.”
