LONDON: “Two Men in Benares,” in the 1980s, portrayed by Indian modern artist Bhupen Khakhar, has set a new public sale record for the painter with the aid of selling at a whopping $. Three 2 million here.
The sale took place at the Sotheby’s public sale residence on Monday. Going underneath the hammer became the “Coups de Coeur: The Guy and Helen Barbier Family Collection,” providing 29 artworks from one of the greatest collections of 20th-century Indian artwork in private arms.
When Khakhar (1934-2003) first unveiled “Two Men in Benares” in Mumbai in 1986, he had become the first Indian artist to disclose his sexual orientation through his work freely.
The painting shows two naked men in Embody. It “is the maximum specific of what the artist himself called his ‘efforts to come back-out in open’, and to create a new iconography of homosexual love,” Sotheby’s said on its website.
Khakhar was India’s pioneering overtly gay artist.
Widely considering many of the artist’s high-quality works, the painting later starred in Tate Modern’s 2016 “You Can’t Please All” exhibition of Khakhar’s work, the first retrospective of an Indian artist to be held at the group, Sotheby’s stated.
Other works of art at the public sale included M.F. Husain’s “Marathi Woman” (1950), which sold for $553,146; extraordinary figurative paintings by Ram Kumar, “Untitled (Man and Woman Holding Hands)” painted as a present for the artist’s spouse in 1953, bought for $659,960.
The “Anatomy of that Old Story” (1970) from Rameshwar Broota’s ‘Ape’ series was additionally bought for $537,887.
Ishrat Kanga, Head of Sales at the global auction house, stated: “These fantastic outcomes are a tribute to the pioneering spirit of Guy and Helen Barbier, who passionately sought out great examples of Indian artwork at a time whilst few others had notions too.
“They collected with a ‘coups de Coeur,’ acquiring works that they sincerely cherished and with an actual commitment to coming across and celebrating Indian artwork.”
Another sale on Monday, right here, noticed Francis Newton Souza’s monumental Untitled painting being sold for $1.Five million.
