For those checking out an investment opportunity within the continent’s cultural context, the Teheran collective is worth consideration.
The question begs itself: why should anyone in India be interested in Iranian art? And the answer is just as logical. On the one hand, there have been historical and cultural links between India and Iran that go further back than the Persian court artists whose elevation and domination of Indian ateliers is well established. But the more important, and currently valid, reason is the rise and interest in the Iranian art market.
Experts believe that, fiscally, the Iranian art market is four or five years behind India’s, having just taken off, with prices that are lower than those of comparable Indian artists. While the first Indian artist crossed the $1 million threshold in 2005, in Iran the same barrier was breached only in 2008. Prices have risen steadily since then, but unlike in India, they have gone neither as high, nor have prices for contemporary artists crashed by as much as 70 per cent as the did here.
Farhad Moshiri’s eponymous Love, which combines a Sufi sensibility cheekily rendered in Swarovski crystals as a nod to the commerce of mass market consumption, managed to make $1 million in March 2008 at Bonhams Dubai. He is widely regarded as Iran’s equivalent of Subodh Gupta — not because of any similarity in their work (there is none) but because of the respect with which he is regarded internationally.
Proof of Moshiri’s popularity is two of his works, from his Jars series which will be auctioned today, at Bonhams sale of modern and contemporary West Asian and South Asian art in London. Even though Iranian modern art and particularly its contemporary painters have been at pains to distance themselves from the stranglehold of the “Middle East” tag, it was at a similar auction that Farhad Moshiri first earned his million-dollar tag.
Buyers of Iranian art have typically been arts institutions — Qatar Museum has been a large collector — as well as financial corporations. Currently, the record for Iran’s highest-paid artist rests with sculptor Parviz Tanavoli whose Persepolis was bought by a private bank, Pasargad, for $2.5 million. Now to see whether the modernist Nasrollah Afjehei whose Black Homework, the kind of calligraphic abstraction that is both extolled as well as weighs down the region’s art, and which is on the cover of the Bonhams catalogue, bests the contemporary Farhad Moshiri Jars. Both artists’ works are similarly estimated at $62,000-93,000, or under Rs 50 lakh.
Reza Derakshani’s Masters of Pleasure has a value estimate of $25,000-37,000, while those looking for cheaper options should check out Parvaneh Etemadi ($4,600-7,700), Sadegh Tirafkhan ($4,600-7,700) or Faramarz Pilaram ($7,700-11,000).
The stabilisation of the West Asian art market has to do, in part, with Dubai appearing recession-proof — until the Dubai World crisis — when the rest of the world grappled with falling art prices. Sales in the glamorous emirate increased from $2 million in 2006 to $35.7 million in 2008, and though 2009 looked glum in comparison, collectively the international auction houses hope the boom is back this year. Even though private equity funding for art is a little difficult to find, interest at least is on steroids and galleries have become more professional: rare is the show that will not be accompanied by a catalogue, for instance.
Unlike Dubai, the scene in Teheran might be a little less cosmopolitan because content is regulated, though it is understood that artists are likely to experiment with adventurism and voyeurism in works that are intended for secret sales, paintings that you will never see on the walls of its approximately 300 galleries. Whether this underground art movement has the same sort of resonance as, say, music or literature, is difficult to predict.
Just as in India, or Egypt, the modern art movement in Iran had its genesis in the late forties and early fifties, the death of artist Kamal-ol-molk in 1940 marking the end of the strict adherence to academic realism. The 1950s saw the emergence of artists such as Marcos Grigorian in Iran and Mahmoud Said in Cairo whose La Chimere group (1927-30) was a predecessor of Bombay’s Progressive Artists’ Group that disbanded similarly when its promoter and some member artists migrated to the West. Interestingly, the Iranian and Egyptian artists exhibited alongside the Indian modernists in the fifties in Paris and London, and the Bonhams auction features an impressionistic work by Said that predates his La Chimere group and another by Mohammad Naghi, who was also a member of the group.
The current contemporary scene in Iran seems more exciting than in Egypt or any of the other West Asian countries, whether Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco or Saudi Arabia. Investing or building a collection from its emerging art pool could be an option to India’s contemporary art movement which recently imploded on its own hype.
Within Asia, while prices for Chinese and Indian artists have risen the highest in value, analysts predict that Iranian art is similarly poised and could be the next market opportunity. Particularly for those who travel frequently to West Asia, or have business in Dubai, Iranian art could be an attractive prospect — whether to collect or invest, that decision being ultimately your own.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.
