The economic recession may be bothering most industries but it has at least given Indian art one reason to smile.
Spain’s prestigious ARCOmadrid art festival has invited Indian galleries to show there — to boost buyer interest!
The economic recession may be bothering most industries but it has at least given Indian art one reason to smile. The annual ARCOmadrid art festival in Spain, which attracted 1.9 lakh visitors last year, has formally invited Indian galleries to showcase their work this February. This is the first time in the history of the 28-year-old art festival that India will find representation.
“For the last 12 years, we have been inviting guest countries to participate and we don’t charge them anything. The idea is to introduce India to the art market here. We hope that next time around, galleries from India would want to buy places and exhibit their artists’ works at the fair,” said Lourdes Fernández, director, ARCOmadrid.
Interestingly, one of the maim reasons for inviting India is that the recession is forcing the fair to broaden its base — to retain buyer interest.
“Unfortunately Indian art is not very well known in Europe but the curiosity and interest in knowing more about Indian art is immense and hence we thought that both Indian galleries and us will profit out of this venture,” admits Lourdes.
Whatever the compulsions, Indian galleries don’t seem to mind. Many well known ones like Sakshi, Bodhi, Vadhera, Kashi, Chemould Prescott Road are among the 13 galleries that are readying to showcase works of about 50 Indian artists at the fair. And they are certainly putting their best foot forward — the focus will be on contemporary works and artists like Jitish Kallat, Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, TV Santosh and Hema Upadhyay.
Meanwhile Lourdes, who had visted India last April to take a few rounds of Indian galleries, also confirmed that the Vadhera art gallery would be putting up some works of FN Souza and MF Husain too.
“I realised that contemporary art galleries are rather competitive. So we decided to get a curator to do the job of selecting the best of the galleries for us,” reveals Lourdes. The man? Bose Krishnamachari. “We figured that Bose has cordial relations with all the galleries.”
So while the fear of recession is very real even for the art world, Lourdes maintains, “People are curious to know more about Indian art and we have got a good response after inviting India as a guest country. But with this recession, nobody can say anything. We can just hope for the best.”
d_riddhi@dnaindia.net
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