Mumbai to get first major art fair this November

Mumbai, India’s monetary capital and most populous metropolis, is to get its first main artwork truthful this November. Artwork Mumbai (16-19 November) will happen on the Mahalaxmi Racecourse, a historic horse racing monitor within the metropolis’s centre, and have round 50 exhibitors, principally from India. These embrace a few of its main galleries, comparable to Experimenter (Kolkata, Mumbai), Vadehra Artwork Gallery (New Delhi) and Chatterjee & Lal (Mumbai); they are going to be joined by smaller outfits comparable to Sumukha from Bangalore. 5 abroad galleries specialising in South Asian artwork—together with Grosvenor in London and Aicon from New York—may even present on the truthful.

The launch of Artwork Mumbai is critical for India, the place for the previous 15 years just one main truthful has been held: the India Artwork Truthful (IAF) in New Delhi. IAF’s final occasion, which ran from 9-12 February 2023, noticed 71 galleries participate—its largest version thus far. IAF’s organisers stated that the truthful’s progress was proof of the latest power of India’s up to date artwork market, which in keeping with a latest report by Indian Artwork Investor, noticed its strongest 12 months ever when it comes to turnover in 2022.

Whereas the Mumbai truthful is relatively boutique in dimension, its organisers are treating the inaugural version as a “take a look at run”. Future editions will doubtless embrace worldwide galleries promoting blue-chip artwork, comparable to Continua and Lisson, each of which expressed curiosity to participate, in keeping with Artwork Mumbai’s co-founder, Dinesh Vazirani. He’ll organise the truthful alongside along 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 among India’s main public sale homes, headquartered in Mumbai. Dinesh Vazirani, who’s the public sale home’s chief government, dismisses issues from The Artwork Newspaper that his dominant place inside India’s secondary artwork market poses a battle of curiosity along with his new position as a good organiser and proprietor.

“In India there has all the time been a robust blurring of traces between the first and secondary markets,” he says. “Galleries have change into public sale homes, and public sale homes associate with galleries to do a whole 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 varied promoting platforms the world over. I additionally assume that it’s essential to do not forget that India, not like different nations, began with a web-based mannequin for auctions, and went to IRL [in real life] later. The principles we play by aren’t all the identical.”

Artwork Mumbai is a “completely separate firm” to SaffronArt, he continues, and the public sale home shouldn’t be an official promoter, though Saffronart’s non-profit basis—run by a distinct staff to the public sale home—can have a sales space on the truthful.

The truthful might 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 otherwise to their Delhi counterparts,” Bhandare says. “They’re a bit extra experimental and fewer into model names; in addition they care much less about what their mother and father are shopping for—there isn’t as sturdy 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 distinguished New Delhi-based collectors comparable to Kiran Nadar shifted focus in the direction of the capital. However this was not all the time 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—comparable to VS Gaitonde and SH Raza—command a few of the highest costs of Indian artists at public sale immediately. They have been supported early of their careers by the 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 isn’t 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 present 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 variety 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 truthful stays to be seen. Vazirani says that he approached IAF’s proprietor, the worldwide truthful firm Angus Montgomery, to collaborate, however was informed that they “weren’t prepared”. Vazirani factors out that, compared, Artwork Mumbai is “Indian owned” and might be “extra private” as a result of its organisers know the galleries intimately.

It’s no secret that IAF had been contemplating a Mumbai enlargement for a variety 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 a couple of main artwork truthful a 12 months. Whereas this will likely have been the case earlier than, it’s not, Vazirani believes, with the home market in impolite well being.

Past the promise of sturdy gross sales, Artwork Mumbai may even assert itself by tapping into what is maybe the town’s best-known cultural export: Bollywood glamour. Vazirani says that he has been in contact with figures from Mumbai’s glittering movie business to stage a sequence of galas and events that may make the truthful “one to recollect”.