Collectors and buyers agree that there’s a market for scaled-down sizes in art .
In hindsight, it was so obviously inevitable, it’s amazing that few of us actually saw it. Even as the markets crashed, people lost fortunes and the meltdown became a reality, interest in art did not entirely wane. There were fewer big-ticket purchases, true; prices plummeted, true; there were far fewer shows to go to too, true; but people still wanted to look at art, thronged museums (at least in the West) and, as the recent India Art Summit in New Delhi has proven, couldn’t get enough of it.
What also became clear at the summit was that buyers – many of them newer, even first-time buyers – were not wary of picking up small works of known artists. Sales surged, but almost all gallerists confirm that it was the smaller works that got snapped up first, while word is out that the larger works have been reserved but may or may not translate into sales. A few of the galleries were smart enough to spot the trend and actually commissioned paintings for the summit that adhered to the vision to scale down in size – Art Alive’s show was actually called Think Small! – while many merely lucked in with smaller works because of their booth sizes, and found that while the big works may have been draws, what kept the tills ringing were conversions of smaller works into sales.
Seen logically, it makes sense. A Paresh Maity work that costs Rs 15 lakh to Rs 16 lakh on average – the artist is known for his humungous-sized oils, acrylics and even watercolours – was now available for less than Rs 2 lakh, making it easier for a collector to shore up his finances sufficiently to be able to invest in the artist of his choice. Couldn’t afford a Rs 20 lakh Sakti Burman canvas – well, now you can, for less than you might ever have previously considered paying for the artist’s work.
Till recently, artists had let their imaginations and ambitions soar, so a lot of the work in the market – particularly in Delhi, where homes, or offices, or farmhouses exhibit a generosity of space – tended to be both large and expensively priced. Bigger simply became better, sometimes size mattering even more than quality.
This reversal may actually mean good things for both the collector and the artist. For the collector, it means that artists they have aspired to collect could now prove affordable, and that for their money they can get a larger body of works of either the same artist or of different artists. Say, for instance, a conventional Satish Gujral (a work 3’x5’, for instance) that may have been pegged at Rs 25 lakh last year. For the same money you may afford not only a Satish Gujral 1’x1’, but probably another dozen works by artists as varied as Thota Vaikuntam, Neeraj Goswami, Shuvaprasana, Sujata Bajaj, Amit Ambalal, Arpana Caur (who, surprisingly, has also been showing a lot of small works in recent times), Kishor Shinde or Yusuf Arakkal.
Nor is the business of size limited to the mid-rung, mid-range artists. Suddenly, it is possible to see smaller works from everyone from Akbar Padamsee and Krishen Khanna to even S H Raza and F N Souza (mostly his drawings), and their values, compared to their larger works, are infinitely lower – especially now that the despicable trend of valuing artists’ works by the square inch has been all but discarded.
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(A word to the wise: if you need to liquidate your art collection, it is easier by far to sell smaller works of artists even among non-collectors than flogging large works to collectors now that the market is less than buoyant.)
Inevitably, it also means that younger and lesser-known artists have a chance of getting in edgeways as collectors make a bid for new collections with a mix of well-known and lesser-known artists. Most galleries are happy to give you good deals if you’re buying such a mélange from them, but word is out that the best deals are currently available from Bodhi Art, Mumbai, so if you’re looking for value, you know where to head.
For the artist, at a time when sales are sluggish, downsizing (not necessarily to the foot-by-foot format, but at least to a size no more than 2’x2’) and the resultant value in sales signifies a quickening of the market that is welcome. Several artists’ – Padamsee to H A Gade – early, small works, not often seen, are now coming into the market and being snatched up. As a result, galleries and artists are collaborating on making smaller works available in larger numbers – whether canvas, sculpture or mixed media.
Smaller sizes also mean easier shipments, which added to the affordability factor ensures quicker sales. As is evident from the pick-up of sculptor Anish Kapoor – otherwise known as the pasha of scale – whose sculpture, even at Rs 1-crore plus, found a ready buyer in India in these times.
