The Berlin Canvas !

Dear Readers,

Here is my latest article published in The Telegraph newspaper in the Sunday edition reaching over 1 million readers......

Europe has been really cold this winter with a lot of freak storms and a chilly winter. In Berlin, though the art scene has been hot and vibrant. Due to the lovely confluence of cultures, Berlin attracts the best artists and with rental spaces still reasonable as compared to the rest of Europe, it has some of the most stunning gallery spaces.

Both Bodhi and Nature Morte, India’s top contemporary art galleries were present in Berlin at one time (Nature Morte is still around here) and there are also galleries like Christian Hosp which have been showing a lot of Indian and Pakistan contemporary art. Then came the recession and running a gallery with declining sales became a losing proposition and Bodhi had to shut shop.

I was fortunate that there was an important show at the architecturally inspirational “Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt”, the house of world cultures. The building looks like a flying saucer and is brilliantly conceptualised. The curators called the show “Why all the rage?”.

We had three important curators — Valerie Smith, Sussane Stemmler and Cordula Hamschmidt. They explored instances of rage and how it plays a role in people’s life — how rage gets manifested in communities and the effect that it has on people’s minds and bodies. The idea of rage as transformative energy is a key concept to the development of “On Rage” a vehicle from the negative to the positive, from status quo to revolution, from hopelessness to control.

Two artists who really stood out for me in the entire show were Shoja Ajari, an Iranian artist who now lives in New York. He was the co-winner of a Silver Lion award at Venice Film festival and he does photographs and video installations. Final Judgment, his work, was a video projection on canvas and projects the moral tales of Shiite Islam concerning the judgment day. Then inside this intricate work there was recent news footage of Muslim global political activity. It was stunning to see a canvas with flitting moving images — a very strong representation.

Shoja Azari‘s Final Judgement

Seher Shah was at her best with large scale drawings from her solo show “Paper to Monument 2”. These drawings dwelled on the complexities of urban excavation through public memory. Her three works were in the centre of the display and the black-and-white contrast of her drawings again reinforced my belief that she is one of the most important young artists of our times.

Paper to Monument II by Seher Shah

I also went to Probir Gupta’s show at Nature Morte Berlin. Probir’s work touches upon issues of war, religion, development, globalisation and genocide. He uses shrapnel in his work that he sources from abandoned military waste. Using this debris as his “clay,” he models mutant and macabre bodies and landscapes. The resulting paintings, fascinatingly complex with unexpected shots of colour, are chaotic to look at. Technically, he employs a thick, almost violent, use of impasto and brush strokes.

Assembled Identities by Probir Gupta

I liked the works which are not new but are the works that did not sell in the Philips de Pury auction house exhibition in January 2009. The works were beautiful but you could see that the pricing could have been better and hence even when I went, only one had sold. Large canvas works were priced at Rs 25 lakh. Now with the top names in Indian contemporary art down by 80 per cent from the peaks, Probir has still not understood the reality on pricing.

Artists need to understand that just because they sold a few works some years back at the height of the Indian contemporary art boom that does not become a pricing platform for years to come. I would have ideally liked the works to be priced drastically lower.

But in the art world, egos are bigger than usual and logic dies a slow death. That also shrinks the small collector base as people don’t like being taken for a ride. It’s high time that artists understood that collectors will not buy without logic and the fact that only one work has virtually sold in the last 15-18 months is a testimony to the new and informed collector !

Well, the journey was not complete in the art city of the world without staying in the art’otel at Berlin City Centre West. What attracted me to the hotel was the collection of Andy Warhol works they had. I enjoyed staying a in a hotel surrounded by the pop art works of Warhol and the rooms in bright orange, purple and green. Let us see when we get our first art hotel in the country!

Kapil Chopra is Senior Vice President of Oberoi Hotels & Resorts.He writes a blog on collecting and investing in Indian Contemporary Art at www.indianartinvest.blogspot.com.He also writes for The Telegraph Newspaper in the Sunday magazine " Graphiti" every fortnight. In Delhi, he writes for "The Mail Today " Newspaper and the "First City" Magazine.

The Crash and After !

Dear Friends,

This is the article published in "Graphiti" the Sunday magazine of The Telegraph newspaper on the 3rd of January giving my views on the year gone by and the road ahead !

It’s been a turbulent year for all asset classes including art but it’s thankfully drawing to a close on a better note than it started. However, it’s left behind some hefty damage — especially at the speculative end. What are the relevant lessons of the past year for Indian Contemporary Art — how can one build a portfolio that holds its value during rough weather?

We should note right away that the market for the modern artists — especially Gaitonde, Souza, Husain, Raza and a real gem whom we lost this year, Tyeb Mehta — remains strong but even among those art titans there are some pretty steep price variations. What this difficult year highlighted was the importance of quality and not just names. So if you’re lucky enough to possess a Souza work from the late ’50s to the early ’60s, the price for a 2ft by 3ft canvas now could be Rs 75 lakh, but if you have a Souza work from the late ’80s, within the same size range, the price could be just Rs 20 lakh.

Landscape with Houses and Lake by F.N. Souza

In the contemporary space, the speculative side of the market has taken the biggest hit. There had been a lot of froth in the market and that has been pretty roundly removed. All the key stakeholders — galleries, artists and collectors — were caught up in the tide of ever rising values and when the bad times struck, prices crashed by as much as 75 per cent.

A lot of artists, even those who had been bracketed in the top tier, suddenly found they weren’t selling at all when confidence troughed in March. One of the most flamboyant art galleries in the last four years, Bodhi Art Gallery, which had presences in Delhi, Mumbai, Singapore, New York and Berlin, finally closed down all its locations this year under the weight of mounting costs as their roster of artists slumped from the lofty valuations they’d enjoyed just a year earlier.

Atul Dodiya’s Sleeping with the Stars

I feel the fall of Bodhi Art Gallery, which some rivals had regarded as too commercial, has not been a good thing for the world of Indian contemporary art. Bodhi was a leader in redefining some of the norms on presenting and displaying art, publishing arguably the best catalogues with each show and also taking Indian contemporary art to an international collector base.

It also had some of the best sites, welcoming and well-informed gallery staff and a really conducive environment for viewing art. But the scale and magnitude of the operation built on a group of artists who’d started to believe the hype was too much and finally led to the demise of what was, at one point of time, India’s most powerful contemporary art gallery. It was built on a model of investment and financial returns and though art is a financial asset anyone who looks at it merely through a commercial prism is bound to fail.

And there is a lesson in the recently concluded Christies’ Hong Kong sale of contemporary art. Its price estimates were completely out of whack with market realities. So it was not surprising to see that most of the works did not even manage a decent bid.

So what ultimately is the takeaway for collectors and galleries from these cautionary tales? In the good times, don’t get carried away by hype. It’s important to note that what keeps its value is quality — but only at the right price. Still even in these difficult times, a 1979 work by Jogen Choudhary was able to smash all records in the Sotheby’s auction to breach the Rs 2 crore mark due its incomparable quality.

All in the Landscape by Probir Gupta

Now, though, the situation is looking rosier for the art world. Art Tactic, an art research firm which tracks confidence in Indian contemporary art, has seen its confidence index recover to 46 from 19. This means that 46 per cent of the collector community surveyed will buy contemporary art at current valuations — perhaps not as good a figure as one would like but still a lot better than the 19 per cent registered earlier when times were tougher. Another pointer to improving sentiment is the recently concluded Saffron Art auction in which 62 per cent of its art works sold above the higher estimate — underscoring that the market is recovering its poise.

Looking ahead to the first quarter of 2010, one of the most interesting events is a show by cutting edge British collector Charles Saatchi at his Saatchi Art Gallery in London. The show, aptly titled “The Empire Strikes Back,” will put India — and Pakistan — in the global contemporary art spotlight once again, something which had happened with Arco Madrid last February where India was the focus country. But the timing of Saatchi’s exhibition is better in the context of the recovery in global markets than the Madrid show.

Saatchi’s show, which opens on 29 January, promises to be really eye-catching. The roughly 26 artists featured include a mix of the top names in the Indian and Pakistan contemporary art space and also some new names you may not even have heard of. Some of the younger artists showing are Sakshi Gupta, T. Venkanna, Kriti Arora, Rajesh Ram and Rajan Krishnan among others. You may also want to take a peek at some of the research Saatchi has put up for this show, which you can view at www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk.

Here at home keep an eye out locally for well-known photographer Rashid Rana’s show, curating at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon starting January 16. This exhibit, focusing on the journey of Pakistani contemporary art, should be quite interesting, considering the passion of Anupam Poddar and the pioneering work he has done in the world of collecting Pakistani art.

Now in the meantime, let me wish you all a Happy New Year and a good time collecting in 2010.

Kapil Chopra is Senior Vice President of Oberoi Hotels & Resorts.He writes a blog on collecting and investing in Indian Contemporary Art at www.indianartinvest.blogspot.com.He also writes for The Telegraph newspaper in the Sunday magazine " Graphiti" every fortnight. In Delhi, he writes for "The Mail Today " newspaper and "First City" magazine.