NEW YORK.- Sotheby’s fall sale of Modern and Contemporary Art South Asia: India—Pakistan will be held in New York on September 18, 2008. The auction will include a diverse offering of paintings, sculpture and photography by such important Indian artists as Tyeb Mehta, M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar, Thukral & Tagra, Subodh Gupta, Ravinder Reddy, Sudarshan Shetty, Rashid Rana and Shilpa Gupta, among many others. The offering of 127 lots is estimated to bring $7.6/10.6 million.

The top lot of the sale, and leading the Modern offerings, is a rarely available Tyeb Mehta, Untitled, one of the latest examples from his Falling Figure with Bird series (est. $1/1.5 million). The canvas, dating from 2003, features the artist’s hallmark use of large diagonal planes of flat color, here masterfully executed in starkly contrasting tones of red and magenta with pristine whites. Living in India during Partition and after World War II, Mehta experienced firsthand the violence, anguish and distress of the period, to which experts attribute his consistent illustration of struggle in his works throughout his career. Here, the enormous bird and central human figure twist through the canvas, entwined and violently distorted. Yet the picture delicately balances the struggle with the sparseness of line and deceptively simple composition for which Mehta’s later work is lauded.

Also being offered are several works by Francis Newton Souza, including The Orange Head from 1963, (est. $400/600,000). Souza in the 60s remained tirelessly experimental, revealing an artist confident in his skin, keen to stretch his own artistic boundaries yet in a manner that remained true to his own artistic vision. At this time his canvases became more fluid, his application of paint more varied and the texturing of his backgrounds more detailed. The current work is an exceptionally large example from this important period in his career. Souza compared himself to Picasso—whom he considered the measuring stick of originality and artistic invention—revealing his determination to remain firmly within the boundaries of figurative art while continuing to break new ground in his approach. By the early 60s he was moving away from the rigid construction of the previous decade, expanding his signature parallel lines with signature motifs appearing alongside the crosshatched lines, in particular the water droplet or amoeba-like circle which is integral to the current work.

The sale will also feature a selection of early figurative works by Maqbool Fida Husain, highlighted by an Untitled image of horses (est. $250/350,000), a subject of fascination for the artist from an early age. In the work seen here it is unclear whom the figures along the left edge of the work represent, but in such an early example of the horses in Husain’s work it is possible that the tall bearded man is his grandfather, who used to take him to the local farrier in Indore—visits that had a permanent impact on the artist. Husain returned to the subject of the horse repeatedly in his work. In classical Indian art and myth they are symbols of the sun itself, of time and of knowledge, and horses were often sacrificed to secure fertility. For Husain they are also symbols of life-sustaining forces. Riderless, his horses look out across timeless landscapes or back towards an unseen audience. The images are metaphorical, at times powerfully erotic or sublimely tragic.

Rabindranath Tagore’s creative output as a poet, author, playwright and artist was immense, and in 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first non-Westerner to be honored with the award. His career as a painter dates from around 1928, though he is known to have drawn sketches throughout his career. What began as doodling on his working manuscripts became an obsession after 1930, and it is thought that in the last ten years of his life he produced over two thousand pictures. His work was publicly displayed for the first time in Paris in 1930. Tagore’s work is represented in this sale by Head of Woman, left, from 1939 (est. $30/40,000), formerly in the collection of William Elmirst of Dartington Hall in England. It is well documented that the artist had a close relationship with the Elmhirst family, and was a frequent visitor to the estate.

Another highlight of the modern portion of the sale is Untitled (Portrait of a Parsee Lady), est. $80/120,000, by Raja Ravi Varma, a leading exponent of the new class of Indian artists who emerged in the mid-19th century. The precepts of European realist painting were introduced in India with the establishment of art schools in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay during that period, aiming to wean Indian artists away from the formulaic and centuries-old miniature painting tradition and instead cultivate the skills to faithfully render the natural likenesses of their subjects. Ravi Varma was the first Indian painter to adopt Western painting traditions, but his choice of subjects remained firmly rooted in Indian life, as can be seen here.

Also included is Untitled (Varanasi) by Ram Kumar (est. $150/200,000), from 1965. From the mid-1950s, Kumar produced a series of figurative works that provide a visual commentary to the despair experienced by so many in post-Independence urban India, with forlorn figures staring out of bleak urban landscapes. But in 1961 his visits to Varanasi, and the desolation he sensed there, marks a significant shift in his work, from his figurative phase to a semiabstracted world where the human figure is noticeably absent. The dramatic intensity of his figurative paintings is retained in the Varanasi canvases, but the works attain a kind of austere brilliance, a certain ascetic purity. This process, whereby form and the orchestration of color becomes central to his artistic process, was to continue for many years. Yet the paintings themselves retain the urge to express the desolation or loss that the artist so frequently witnessed in the lives of those around him.

The Indian Contemporary Art portion of the sale is highlighted by Subodh Gupta, whose radical invocation of the cow visually sets forth the rural-tourban, local-to-global dialogue that dominates 21st-century thinking about the art of India. One Cow, 2003 (est. $600/800,000) is an outstanding example. Prior to 2003, Gupta’s paintings and sculptures of cows were recognizable as the sacred bovines that have wandered the streets of India for centuries, as both providers of sustenance and living objects of veneration. But now, in the big cities of India, cows are herded and penned, and milk is delivered by bicycle-riding doodhwallahs (milkmen). Through his re-consecration of the cow as a stand-alone icon—both idol and art—Gupta has transported it in paint and metal from a local to a globally revered object (both four-legged and two-wheeled), while opening wider the dialogue about mobility as it is manifest in the art world. The doodhwallah’s bicycle is immediately recognizable to any urban Indian. It is not an invented fantasy, but an everyday object, like so many that Gupta has transformed into art, glorifying, these quotidian symbols of rural India through their placement in 21st century venues of cultural worship, art galleries and museums.

Also featured is Thukral & Tagra’s Metropolis 1 (est. $120/180,000), a diptych from 2007. Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra work collaboratively in a wide variety of media inspired as much by fashion and advertising as by art history. Utilizing their fake brand “Bosedk” (a tonguein-cheek Anglicization of an abusive term in Punjabi), Thukral & Tagra blur the lines between fine art and popular culture, product placement and exhibition design, artistic inspiration and media hype. The current work brings together a number of these themes to present massive billboard-style images that comment on consumerism, the commoditization of art and the recycling of styles. The effect is to make one conscious of the collusion between the art market, the retail industry, globalization and fashion branding.

The contemporary portion of the sale also features a selection of works by contemporary South Asian artists working in a variety of media, such as Atul Dodiya, Justin Ponmany, Balasubramanian, Jitish Kallat, Hema Upadhyay and Ayesha Mariam Durrani.

Sculpture highlights include G. Ravinder Reddy’s large terracotta head, Untitled (Radha) (est. $160/220,000) from a private European collection, acquired from the Camden Art Center exhibition that toured the U.K. in 1993. Also featured is an early bronze sculpture by Meera Mukherjee, Untitled (est. $60/80,000), and other Untitled works by Sudarshan Shetty (est. $20/30,000) and Nataraj Sharma (est. $6/8,000).

Sotheby’s has been at the forefront in including cutting-edge photography in their sales of Indian art, and this sale is no exception, featuring works by both established contemporary artists such as Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana, whose Dislocation II (Edition 2 of 5) is seen here (est. $45/55,000) as well as relatively new names. The latter group illustrates many of the current trends in contemporary photography such as conceptual themes (Vivek Vilasini), comments on social issues (Sunil Gupta) and performance (Tejal Shah).