“I don’t know if the understanding or the vision or the knowledge is there yet,” says Ranjana Steinruecke, co-owner of Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, “but it should come.” Steinruecke has every reason to be hopeful. Since opening her airy, loft-like gallery two years ago, Steinruecke and her mother Usha Mirchandani have regularly supplemented paint-and-canvas shows with unusual performances and talks.
A painting by Meese
While Smith, an acclaimed German artist displayed ink and watercolour works, Japan-born Meese, a highly controversial performance artist, complemented his vividly drawn oils with a somewhat unsettling performance at the National Center for the Performing Arts, where he pranced around the stage giving the Nazi salute in his underwear. “I think a lot of people missed the point,” Steinruecke muses. “Art is about pushing those limits, and opening up areas of discomfort… It’s important to show how much more the West has done. It’s vital for a meaningful dialogue.”
Despite the controversy, Steinruecke, who is currently exhibiting works by German woodcutter Mansen, says that non-Indian art tends to sell almost as well as Indian art. Yet, not everyone who attended Meese’s performance and his more muted recital at the opening, thought this signalled changing times. On his blog Collectors Mind, Maskara wrote: “Did anyone stop to wonder how come an artist...regarded as a front-runner contemporary artist from Germany, still manages to sell large format, significant works on canvas for a fraction of the price that some of our stars command?”
Maskara could relate. Priced between Rs50,000 and Rs8 lakh, Streicher’s floating figures, and black-and-white photographs, were selling for less than the watercolour and ink drawings of a first-time solo artist showing elsewhere in the city. “Are we catering to the market, or trying to create a new market?” he rues. Despite varying degrees of interest from local collectors, one of his first buyers was a French couple who walked in off the street, thrilled to find a recognizable name selling for a comparative snip.
Silenus, the bobbing giant, was bought by artist, curator and avid collector Bose Krishnamachari. “If you look at Subodh Gupta you can, for the same price, buy a work from an artist like Jeff Koons,” he notes drily. Having amassed a small collection by Damien Hirst, Kiki Smith, Gary Hume, and Edward Rucha, Krishnamachari is keen to start his own museum, possibly in Kochi or, if funds allow, Mumbai.
However, with that two or three years away, artists, and the people who promote them, remain cautious. “I’m not expecting much,” says Mansen, a lanky and affable German whose panels of ashen birch trees and rain-splashed puddles can be found hanging in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Indeed, two weeks into the show, only a couple of pieces, priced between €4,500 (Rs2.95 lakh) and €28,000, had been sold, though given the slowing pace of the summer season, this was somewhat expected. “In an audience of 100, if six people think it’s fabulous, then it’s okay,” Steinruecke says, shrugging it off.
Xiaoming Zhang, the Sotheby’s Chinese contemporary specialist, who accompanied the travelling exhibit, similarly confessed, “The reaction was encouraging and exciting for us, but it’s a slow process getting real interest from Indian collectors.”