With over 700 auctions to its credit, a flagship gallery in Mumbai, and offices in New Delhi, London and New York, Saffronart auction house is celebrating 25 years of online as well as physical auctions. Edited excerpts from conversation with Dinesh Vazirani, CEO & co-founder of Saffronart auction house:
The 25th anniversary auction celebrates a milestone this year. Can you tell us more about the upcoming auction? What are your expectations?
We plan to do several sales, and to start with, the first live sale is in March in Mumbai, followed by our anniversary auction on April 2. For the anniversary sale, we have gathered catalogues with works that have been not seen before. We are celebrating in collaboration with 100 years of the Tyeb Mehta Foundation which has works from his estate in our auction. Tyeb Mehta, Trussed Bull, 1956, is estimated at Rs 5-7 crore; Amrita Sher-Gil, Still Life with Green Bottles and Apples, 1932, is estimated at Rs 12-15 crore, besides a well-rounded representation of the best of Indian modern art and contemporary art include Subodh Gupta, Skin White Mask, 2011, mixed media, estimated at Rs 1.54-1.89 crore; Bharti Kher and Atul Dodiya, to name a few. With the best of the lot, we hope the auction will do very well as the market indications are strong.
With the global art market becoming vibrant, there’s also huge interest in Indian art. How much has interest and value gone up in the past decade?
Post-Covid, the Indian art market has become very vibrant with both Indian and non-Indian buyers taking it seriously. Art has now been ingrained in people’s minds, and also there is desire to acquire the best. People are willing to pay for the value based on the importance of a painting.
The Indian art auction market has almost doubled in the past five years, to over $200 million, and this is only half of the art market. I’m not counting the private gallery sales. Indian art market with both options and private sales would be around $400 million, which is about Rs 3,500 crore. We sold Amrita Sher-Gil’s ‘The Story Teller’ in the evening sale of 2023, an oil on canvas, for Rs 61.8 crore, which set the record for the most expensive Indian artwork to be sold at an auction.
What are the biggest learnings in the past 25 years?
Be it art, jewellery or other objects, we should present it with grace and beauty. Connect with people from you can learn as art is an educated purchase. The more dialogues in art we do, the more we engage with people. As an auction house, we have learnt to be transparent. Lastly, we must not give up. It might not work for a while, but keep going, and eventually it will work.
You have dealt in antiquities, jewellery, art, collectible books. Which section has a stronger response?
We have focused on art, especially modern Indian art, which is now also the case with museums coming up in India. This will lead the market. Antiquities, on the other hand, are picking up. With the Archaeological Survey of India involved, India has a rich heritage, so antiquities and miniatures will surely take centrestage at some point.
Which geographies, across the globe and in India, have worked well for your auctions?
The strongest market for Indian art is India. I say it for several reasons. One is that the Indian economy is doing very well. People are generating a lot of wealth and have realised that you cannot today have a big and beautiful home and not have great art in it. People are knowledgeable, they understand art, so they notice the difference. The market in India is primarily driven by Delhi and Mumbai, where art prices are going up. What we also find is satellite cities like Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai are slowly building up as more people are interested in the art market.
You started as an online auction house, and later went on to a physical format. Which medium is popular among buyers?
For the first 10-15 years, Saffronart did online auctions. We were the first auction house to go online. Now we plan to go hybrid. The biggest advantage is that it is anonymous. India hasn’t seen so many live auctions, and it’s one way to get people into the art world. We did one hybrid auction in Bengaluru almost a decade back, which was very successful. With the art market growing in satellite cities, we would like to explore one hybrid auction in a satellite city, maybe Hyderabad.
Both formats complement each other.
Do you see young buyers buying art also as a form of investment?
Art has to be looked partly as an investment as there’s a lot of money put into buying art. Balancing the investment aspect along with the aesthetic aspect is the right way to buy art. Young people today are doing their research. They study and have knowledge before they buy an artwork, which is a big difference from the past. It’s a very healthy way for a market to grow. Between the age group of 25 and 35 years, many young professionals or entrepreneurs start buying art seriously and these buyers look at more contemporary art as it resonates with them.
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