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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Feature |
The Gallerist
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| Peter Nagy and the rise of contemporary Indian art |
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Published : 1 December 2011 |
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COURTESY NATURE MORTE |
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| The recently opened Nature Morte in The Oberoi, Gurgaon.
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| Y |
OU NEED THREE THINGS to run an art gallery successfully—the knowledge of art, knowledge of the history of art and how to talk the talk,” I was told by Peter Nagy who runs the Gallery Nature Morte in Delhi, Gurgaon and Berlin. Anyone who knows him even casually will agree he is not lacking in the third quality. |
On a pleasant early-November Sunday evening, the gallery in Delhi was hosting an annual fundraiser for KHOJ—a nonprofit organisation that has been promoting alternative and experimental art, mostly in Delhi, since it was established, like Nature Morte, in 1997. The evening had just begun—the first guests were trickling in and finishing touches were still being put to the paintings, photos and sculptures on display that had been donated by the artists.The occasion was a little more special than a regular show opening for the gallery and there were additional flourishes—soothing ambient music filled the space as classical guitarist Shyamant Behal warmed up for his recital; and a very well-lit and large temporary bar sponsored by a fashionable gin brand, stood on the gallery’s back lawn.
I was in the lawn with a friend, a young textile designer associated with KHOJ, who saw Nagy and called out to him. Dressed in trousers with bold stripes and a brown denim jacket, Nagy came over and joined us. With the preparations completed, he finally looked relaxed. As always, his brown hair was stylishly set, and he was sporting his greying stubble and his round wire-frame Gandhi glasses. He checked the time on his mobile phone and said he wanted to join us for a drink, but would wait for another 11 minutes until it was six o’ clock. My friend suggested a cocktail from the glowing bar behind us but Nagy made a face. “I don’t drink gin,” he declared. “I have some very good wine inside.”
| BIPLAB MUZIBAR RAHAMAN / DELHI PRESS IMAGES |
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Peter Nagy at Gallery Nature Morte in Niti Bagh. |
The two broke into an easy conversation and Nagy complimented my friend on the shirt he was wearing, appreciating its oversized collar. He in turn offered to make a similar shirt for Nagy as a present, and they continued talking about clothes and tailored clothing until Nagy held up his mobile, looked at it and turned its screen towards us. It was six o’ clock. “Ring, ring! Time for a drink,” he said, and disappeared.
Nagy can be very expressive when he talks, often with a touch of drama. When he concentrates on what he is saying, which is quite often, he wears an intense expression, speaks quickly and his eyebrows bob up and down with almost every word he utters. After he has made his point, he visibly relaxes and often slips into a deliberately jovial sing-song style of talking, modulating his voice and stretching his words.
It is rare for an Indian to have the kind of command over the English language that an articulate American like Nagy has. In India, where how well you speak English determines your position in society, this can be a big plus. This is just one of the reasons why when Nagy talks, people listen. His employees quietly follow his instructions, and those connected with the art world pay attention because he runs Nature Morte, which is among India’s most successful galleries that show contemporary art and which represents many of India’s most well known contemporary artists. When I was on the art and culture beat for Mint and used to call Nagy for input, I would get the distinct feeling that I was speaking with a busy man—he would reply to my queries quickly and to the point. Usually, what he said would become a key element in the story.
In January this year, Subodh Gupta—Nature Morte’s superstar artist—displayed a bronze sculpture of kneaded dough sprinkled with real flour at his solo show at the gallery. The reviews were peppered with terms like “massive audacity” and “in your face”. Much of the Indian middle class and their wealthier counterparts cannot relate to this kind of art. The phrase used to describe an artwork that is nontraditional, and looks puzzling rather than attractive, is “modern art”, and plenty of contemporary art, a catchall phrase for a lot of art being produced in India since the mid-1980s, falls in this category.
Nevertheless, the visibility of contemporary art and artists, and its market, is growing, spurred by India’s embrace of neoliberal reforms in 1991, by the subsequent fast-paced economic growth, and by the winds of globalisation blowing across the country. Eighty-four galleries from 20 countries set up stalls at the third annual India Art Fair held in Delhi in January this year and 128,000 people came to see the art, most of it contemporary, on display. A new class of wealthy people in India and Non-Resident Indians in the US and Europe have begun collecting art, though, as Nagy points out, collectors’ tastes remain conservative and veer towards paintings. Works by the older established generation of artists, the Modernists and the Progressives, top the market—in 2005 Tyeb Mehta’s painting ‘Mahishasura’ became the first ever work by an Indian to sell for over a million dollars ($1.6 million), and in 2010 Syed Haider Raza’s ‘Saurashtra’ fetched $3.4 million at an auction.
| BIPLAB MUZIBAR RAHAMAN / DELHI PRESS IMAGES |
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Subodh Gupta is one of the top contemporary artists who Nature Morte represents. |
“The late 1990s to the later part of the next decade is when the party began and lasted,” says Delhi-based artist Anita Dube who has worked with Nagy since 1997. The contemporary Indian art market grew, fuelled in part by demand overseas, and a new generation of talented artists—Subodh Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty, Jitish Kallat, Bose Krishnamachari and Bharti Kher, among others. The absolute boom years—when art buying turned into a mania, both globally and in India—lasted from 2005 until September 2008, when the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed in the US and triggered the economic recession in the West. The art market bubble burst in India too, and hasn’t quite recovered. Reliable figures for the size of the contemporary Indian art market are hard to come by, but according to Arun Vadehra of Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery, the annual art business turnover in India is estimated at $300-400 million.
Nagy’s arrival on the scene from the US in 1992 coincided with the beginning of these developments, though his commitment to contemporary art began when not many cared for it in India. Since he set up Nature Morte (a phrase that translates from the French to ‘Still Life’), he has turned it into one of India’s most successful art galleries, representing many of the best-selling current contemporary artists and introducing them to the international art world. Besides Subodh Gupta, the heavyweights include Bharti Kher (Gupta’s wife), Dayanita Singh, the artist team (Jiten) Thukral & (Sumir) Tagra, Mithu Sen, Jitish Kallat, Jagannath Panda, Raqs Media Collective, Bharat Sikka and Anita Dube. In a typical season, which lasts from August to April, the gallery hosts eight shows in Delhi, almost all of them solo exhibitions of new works. The gallery in Berlin, which he opened in 2008, also hosts eight shows a year, featuring a mix of Indian and international artists.
“I used to show with [Gallery Espace in Delhi] but when I changed my work in 1995-96 and began doing different kinds of work—installations and object-based work—no one was supporting me here,” Subodh Gupta told me. “Peter was showing my kind of art. He took that risk.”
Gupta grew up in a small town outside Patna and graduated from Patna University’s College of Arts and Crafts. He first gained recognition in Europe in the early 1990s for his installations made of everyday stainless steel and copper utensils found in any kitchen in India—thali, lota, tiffin carriers. Nagy told me that currently the price of a painting by Gupta starts at  15 million.
“When I first started working with him ... we couldn’t sell his work anywhere,” Nagy told a television reporter from CNN who had come to the gallery in New Delhi to interview him for a film on Gupta. “Maybe some people were buying some paintings, but certainly not the sculptures—the pots and pans. People thought I was nuts showing these things.”
Nagy made it clear however that he did not make Gupta’s career—in India or in Europe. He said it was entirely because of Gupta’s determination, extreme hard work and his wife Bharti Kher’s guidance that he has made it this big. (“He works like a fucking dog,” Nagy later told the reporter, off camera.)
| COURTESY NATURE MORTE |
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Gupta’s installation ‘Atta’ from the same exhibition. |
This January, Subodh Gupta gave a guided tour of his ongoing show at Nature Morte. Nagy addressed the assembled guests before the tour began, and if anyone thought he would yield the floor to Gupta after saying just a few words, they were mistaken. What followed was an extended and lucid description of Gupta’s own line of thinking and his discussions with Nagy before he began making the sculptures and installations for the show. Nagy candidly mentioned how artists, Gupta included, often come to him with what they think is a very novel idea for making new works, but which is in fact a predictable next step for them. On display as part of the new show were two marble tiffin carriers, the classic emblem of middle class India that Gupta has repeatedly used in his work.
Nagy has made India his home, and has carved a successful career selling contemporary Indian art, but he is the first to admit that he mostly sells to buyers outside India. In the process, he has raised the profile of contemporary Indian art internationally. (With the grim outlook for the economy in Europe, he is now selling three-quarters of his works in India.) “[Peter] knew what the West was looking for. He was at the right place at the right time,” says curator Alka Pande.
When Nagy—who grew up in the suburbs of New York and graduated from the prestigious Parsons School of Design in the city—wants to explain why his gallery finds fewer buyers in India, he tends to refer to Marcel Duchamp. In New York in 1917, Duchamp bought a urinal, the kind found in public bathrooms for men, flipped it on its back by 90 degrees, called it Fountain and submitted it as a work of art for an exhibition. At the time, the show’s organisers refused to display it, but today Fountain is acknowledged as one of the most influential works of art of the 20th century.
In the time that I spent with him at his gallery in Delhi and its brand new counterpart, the Nature Morte gallery in Gurgaon, I heard him mention Duchamp at least three times. Once, it was to the CNN television reporter, also an American. He was explaining to her why conservative Indian collectors might consider buying Gupta’s paintings but not his installation work. He told her—as he had told me some days earlier—that Indians are largely unaware of Duchamp and some other key 20th-century trends in art such as Pop Art and Surrealism.
| COURTESY NATURE MORTE |
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Subodh Gupta’s ‘Twins’ from his show Oil on Canvas at Nature Morte |
In a jokey vein, he added that he had little patience with them when they come to the gallery. “I go, you don’t like Marcel Duchamp? Okay, bye!” he said, breaking into sing-song and stretching the ‘bye’. “And they [the prospective buyers] look at me, and they say ‘uh – huh’. And they leave [thinking], ‘This guy is weird!’”
I asked him if he ever tried to educate such visitors. He said that he did not have the patience. “I tell them to look at our website,” he said.
Swapan Seth, who runs an advertising agency in Delhi, has bought works by Dube, Mithu Sen, Seher Shah and Abhishek Hazra from Nature Morte and has known Nagy for 10 years. “He is called arrogant and rude by many, but he would like to deal with collectors who are like him,” he says about Nagy. Seth also values the fact that Nagy never imposes anything on buyers, and that he doesn’t wear his knowledge of art on his sleeve. “From him it is never a push, more of a nudge,” he says.
The Nature Morte website lists 37 affiliated artists, but Nagy told me that the gallery’s level of involvement with each artist varies, as does the domain of representation. For instance, he represents Gupta and Kher in India only; he has never been involved with their dealings in Europe, the biggest market for their works. On the other hand, he represents Atul and Anju Dodiya outside India only. He is actively working with 12-15 artists and that is all he can handle. He says he can’t take on any new artist regardless of how good he or she is.
In 2006, Nature Morte became the first Indian gallery to have a presence at the prestigious Art Basel international contemporary art fair; and until this year it remained the only Indian gallery to have a booth in the fair’s main section. The gallery also has a booth at the FIAC (Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain) fair in Paris every year.
Nagy claims he has no idea of how much money Nature Morte makes. “I am so bad at business!” he says. But he does quote figures when he starts talking about how bad business has been after the market crash of September 2008, and how “all the money in the bank is gone”. To have a booth at an art fair in Europe costs  60,000-70,000, he says, talking about booth costs, shipping costs, hotels, meals and plane tickets like a savvy veteran. The returns post-crash have often been paltry according to him. At the Paris Photo fair in November 2008 he sold only one photo, by Dayanita Singh for 6,000. “I made 2,500,” he says. The lowest point came in November 2008, when Nature Morte mounted what remains its most ambitious exhibition, showcasing works by 13 of its artists, at the Phillips de Pury & Company auction house in London. It was a big flop—both in terms of attendance and sales.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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rajesh
2 January 2012
04:05 PM
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Fundooo..
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zoker
22 December 2011
12:59 PM
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my age is 22 completed my college iam not professional artist just in free time love making drawings, me want to be rich and dont want to die poor , i want to sell my drawings, iam not too educated like u guys, help me or suggest me , somthing whic can help me in surviving
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