Mumbai, India’s monetary capital and most populous metropolis, is to get its first main artwork honest this November. Artwork Mumbai (16-19 November) will happen on the Mahalaxmi Racecourse, a historic horse racing observe within the metropolis’s centre, and have round 50 exhibitors, largely from India. These embrace a few of its main galleries, resembling Experimenter (Kolkata, Mumbai), Vadehra Artwork Gallery (New Delhi) and Chatterjee & Lal (Mumbai); they are going to be joined by smaller outfits resembling Sumukha from Bangalore. 5 abroad galleries specialising in South Asian artwork—together with Grosvenor in London and Aicon from New York—may also present on the honest.
The launch of Artwork Mumbai is important for India, the place for the previous 15 years just one main honest has been held: the India Artwork Honest (IAF) in New Delhi. IAF’s final occasion, which ran from 9-12 February 2023, noticed 71 galleries participate—its largest version so far. IAF’s organisers mentioned that the honest’s development was proof of the current energy of India’s up to date artwork market, which in keeping with a report by Indian Artwork Investor, noticed its strongest yr ever when it comes to turnover in 2022.
Whereas the Mumbai honest is relatively boutique in dimension, its organisers are treating the inaugural version as a “check run”. Future years will seemingly embrace worldwide galleries promoting blue-chip artwork, resembling Continua and Lisson, each of which expressed curiosity to participate, in keeping with Artwork Mumbai’s co-founder, Dinesh Vazirani. He’ll organise the honest alongside together with his spouse, Minal Vazirani, and the sellers Conor Macklin, the director of Grosvenor Gallery, and Nakul Dev Chawla, the founding father of the net gallery World Artwork Hub.
The Vaziranis are acquainted figures within the Indian artwork world, having co-founded SaffronArt, one in all India’s main public sale homes, headquartered in Mumbai. Dinesh Vazirani, who’s the public sale home’s chief govt, dismisses issues from The Artwork Newspaper that his dominant place inside India’s secondary artwork market poses a battle of curiosity together with his new position as a good organiser and proprietor.
“In India there has at all times been a robust blurring of traces between the first and secondary markets,” he says. “Galleries have turn into public sale homes, and public sale homes accomplice with galleries to do quite a lot of major work. Furthermore, with the web being a levelling platform, tech is more and more blurring the traces between major and secondary and numerous promoting platforms the world over. I additionally suppose that it’s necessary to keep in mind that India, not like different nations, began with a web based mannequin for auctions, and went to IRL [in real life] later. The foundations we play by should not all the identical.”
Artwork Mumbai is a “completely separate firm” to SaffronArt, he continues, and the public sale home will not be an official promoter, though Saffronart’s non-profit basis—run by a unique workforce to the public sale home—could have a sales space on the honest.
The honest will likely be directed by Teesta Bhandare, a curator and collector from New Delhi who has spearheaded younger collector’s occasions throughout India. “Mumbai’s collector base features a rising, youthful skilled class that buys artwork in a different way to their Delhi counterparts,” Bhandare says. “They’re a bit extra experimental and fewer into model names; additionally they care much less about what their mother and father are shopping for—there isn’t as robust a way of legacy of their style.”
Comparisons between India’s two largest business artwork hubs endure for Vazirani too, who says that Mumbai has felt “considerably uncared for” since IAF and outstanding New Delhi-based collectors resembling Kiran Nadar shifted focus in the direction of the capital. However this was not at all times the case: Vazirani argues that Mumbai is the birthplace of modern-day arts patronage in India, having birthed the Bombay Progressives, an artist group based within the 1947, whose members—resembling VS Gaitonde and SH Raza—command a few of the highest costs of Indian artists at public sale right this moment. They had been supported early of their careers by town’s wealthy industrialist households, such because the Tatas and the Goenkas. And this wealth has solely grown: Mumbai has extra billionaires than both Singapore or San Francisco.
Such wealth is not any higher exemplified than by the newly opened Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), a cross-disciplinary arts venue in Mumbai funded by India’s second-richest household, the Ambanis. The centre is at the moment staging Maurizio Cattelan’s first solo exhibition in India, in addition to the nation’s first Mirror Room set up by Yayoi Kusama.
On a extra micro scale, a lot of new galleries displaying rising and mid-career artists have additionally opened within the metropolis over the previous two years, together with XXL, Akara Modern and Apre Artwork Home. This has been interpreted as an indication that Mumbai’s artwork scene has rebounded post-pandemic.
What Artwork Mumbai means in the long term for the New Delhi honest stays to be seen. Vazirani says that he approached IAF’s proprietor, the worldwide honest firm Angus Montgomery, to collaborate, however was informed that they “weren’t prepared”. Vazirani factors out that, as compared, Artwork Mumbai is “Indian owned” and will likely be “extra private” as a result of its organisers know the galleries intimately.
It’s no secret that IAF had been contemplating a Mumbai growth for a lot of years—a plan that by no means took off. A longstanding concern has been whether or not India possesses sufficient severe collectors to maintain multiple main artwork honest a yr. Whereas this may increasingly have been the case earlier than, it’s not, Vazirani believes, with the home market in impolite well being.
Past the promise of robust gross sales, Artwork Mumbai may also assert itself by tapping into what is probably town’s best-known cultural export: Bollywood glamour. Vazirani says that he has been in contact with figures from Mumbai’s glittering movie trade to stage a sequence of galas and events that can make the honest “one to recollect”.
