Indian art: unique yet mainstream
The emergence of Indian art is further evidence of the country's influence. An L.A. exhibition takes a look.
IN INDIAN artist Mithu Sen's 2007 picture "Perhaps You," a dark-skinned woman smiles coyly beneath a blond, '60s-style up-do. The hair appears to be a wig -- until you notice the woman's pale neck. Is she wearing brown makeup? Then you realize that the image is a photocollage: an Indian face pasted atop a white model's.
"I grow wild in these images," Sen said of works like "Perhaps You" in 2007. "The wild woman is not subject to the rules that govern gender behavior in society."
That concept -- the "wild woman" who defies easy description -- runs through "Contradictions and Complexities: Contemporary Art From India," an exhibition on view at two Culver City galleries: d.e.n. contemporary and Western Project. It features Sen and five other artists, all female, whose work combines references to traditional Indian culture with present-day global concerns.
Indian art: An article in the July 8 Calendar section about contemporary Indian art quoted artist Chitra Ganesh as speaking from New York City, where she lives. Although a New York City resident, she was speaking from New York's Catskill Mountains region.
The show, however, is also the latest in a flurry of recent surveys -- others have gone up in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois and Kansas -- designed to introduce 21st century Indian art to U.S. audiences. They signal not only India's rising profile on the international art scene but also the emergence of a new generation of Indian artists.
In May, for example, Subodh Gupta, 44, became the youngest Indian artist to hit the $1-million mark when his painting of a man with a luggage cart, "Saat Samundar Paar (10)" (Across the Seven Seas), sold at a Christie's auction in Hong Kong for nearly $1.2 million. The following month, the auction house took in $25.8 million at a sale of modern and contemporary Indian art -- up from what was then a record $3.7 million at a similar sale in April 2005.
The factors at work
Like the boom in contemporary art from China, the rising fortunes of Indian art are without doubt tied to the nation's emergence as a global economic power. But Saloni Mathur, a professor of art history at UCLA, sees two major developments at work.
The first, she agrees, is "the opening up of the Indian economy and in general the whole phenomenon of globalization that's spearheaded by the Internet." But the other is the growth of a wealthy Indian diaspora -- Indians living outside India -- who have started to collect art from the subcontinent.
