There is something vaguely creepy about Max Streicher’s giant floating dolls. Like the weird naked babies in a Chintan Upadhyay painting, they are, in spite of their benign subject matter, unsettling. Yet, for Abhay Maskara, owner of Warehouse on 3rd Pasta, the cavernous art space in Mumbai currently hosting these works, the dolls are, in a word, lovely. “I’m just here to show good art,” he says, looking up lovingly at Silenus, a 26ft-long bobbing giant, silently being pumped with industrial blowers.
Maskara poses with Streicher’s works (Photo by: Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint)s
In the grand scheme of things, seeing the works of Streicher, a Canadian sculptor with impressive credentials, wouldn’t provide reason to pause. Significant, however, was that the works of Streicher were being seen in Mumbai, and that, more importantly, he wasn’t the only one.
In the last few years, Pablo Picasso, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Kiki Smith, Jonathan Meese, Matthias Mansen, Zhang Xiaogang and several other artists from China, America, and Europe have found their way on to the walls of galleries in New Delhi and Mumbai. To some extent, international art has always had a place in India, usually in the form of token one-offs that galleries ticked off as part of a once-a-year line-up. The artists, when they bothered coming down at all, tended to be obscure, often selected for their “India” connection, a woolly qualifier that somehow almost always involved a period painting the “colours” of the subcontinent.
The change, then, propelled in part by the number of gallerists coming off stints in New York, London, and Berlin, has been in the approach. When smartly curated and integrated as a vital part of a gallery’s roster, international exhibitions can be thought-provoking, helping initiate cross-cultural dialogue, and expose local audiences and artists to genre-bending forms of art.
the Smith exhibit at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke
The key factor in this process has been scaling up the quality, diversity and pedigree of artists being brought over. Picasso, Freud and Bacon all came courtesy of Vadehra Art Gallery in New Delhi, which, since 2006, has been swapping art with London’s Grosvenor Gallery. Earlier this year, Sotheby’s complemented its exhibit of South Asian contemporary and modern works with a small but key collection of noted Chinese artists such as Zhang, Yan Pei-Ming, and Wang Guangyi. Starting in August, two galleries in Mumbai, The Viewing Room and Chatterjee and Lal, through tie-ups with galleries in London and New York, will bring emerging British talent Natasha Kissell and Natasha Law, as well as highly regarded American artists Dona Nelson and Glen Fogel. And, the list continues. Smaller galleries unable to bankroll high-profile names have taken chances on lesser known talent, seemingly unfazed by nearly 15% custom duties, poor commercial prospects and a wary market as yet unwilling to embrace names not ending with Gupta, Dodiya, Kallat, or Komu.