Christie's sale offers 95 exceptional works ranging from $2,000 to $600,000

KOLKATA: On September 17, Christie's will present the Fall sale of South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art, which will offer over 95 exceptional works, with estimates ranging from $2,000 to $600,000 and many from private collections.

The sale will feature works by modern masters, including Syed Haider Raza, Tyeb Mehta, Francis Newton Souza, Akbar Padamsee, Maqbool Fida Husain, and Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, as well as an impressive selection of contemporary works from celebrated artists, such as Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, and Jitish Kallat.

The sale will also feature Sri Lanka's most celebrated 20th century artist George Keyt alongside fellow '43 Group artists George Claessen and Ivan Peries.

The cover lot of the sale is Raza's Italian Village, painted in 1953, the largest work from the period to come to auction (estimate: $550,000-750,000). This painting marked the pivotal moment when Raza would fully embrace the medium of oil painting and in doing so further his ambition in scale, technique and composition.

Italian Village transformed into an austere geometric landscape and epitomizes the influence of European art on Raza during the 1950s.

Additional highlights from Raza include Jour de Liesse, painted in 1963, a shift from an impressionistic brushstroke to a more fluid expressionism (estimate: $200,000-300,000).

This painting maintains strong Indian connotations in its palette with a composition influenced by the Rajasthani miniatures in the artist's personal collection. This highly textured work evokes the lush forests and landscapes that surround Raza's home town in Madhya Pradesh.

La Terre, meaning the earth, articulates Raza's attraction with nature, specifically the forests of Madhya Pradesh, his home town (estimate: $350,000-500,000).

Raza who was in France at this time was physically dislocated from his homeland and so his landscapes provided a conduit of communication to home. These landscapes are emotive in their representations of place and allowed Raza to reconnect and communicate with his own origins and heritage.