LONDON.- To mark the 20th anniversary of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art sales at Christie’s, the upcoming South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art sale will take place on 10 June in London. The sale will be led by the recently discovered self-portrait of Amrita Sher-Gil, painted by the artist at the age of 18, in 1931, while she was living in Paris. Further, the sale presents the most important artistic movements that took place in the subcontinent over the period of a century. The majority of the works offered in this auction derives from private collections and have not been seen in public for decades. The sale comprises 76 lots which will go on public view from 5 June until the sale, which takes place on 10 June at 2.30pm, following the Arts of India Sale, which will start at 11.00am.

Maqbool Fida Husain (1913-2011), who has been called the ‘Picasso of India’, painted the present monumental canvas for the Venice Biennale, where it was exhibited representing India in 1956. During the 1950s, Husain explored the forming iconographies of newly independent India, including the Modernist idiom of pastoral idylls. Husain painted few works of the scale and ambition of the present painting, which has been in private hands in Italy for many years. Using the wide vignette format, the artist creates a storyboard for 1950s India, celebrating its glorious past and the future it promises. Each carefully selected image is a subplot that literally and allegorically narrates the artist’s story of Modern India. In this canvas, which is over eight feet wide, Husain evokes a sense of village life, depicting women at work and powerful patriarchs as symbols of hope and optimism. Mighty tigers coexist with majestic elephants in a representation of unity, strength, fertility and communitarianism. The tall accompanying male figure appears frequently in Husain’s iconography of the time, as a symbol of the sufferings and evil of man inflicted so needlessly in the wake of Partition. The two blank panels possibly refer to the unknown future - a positive hope for the future - a space yet to be filled. (estimate: £750,000-900,000/$1,200,000-1,400,000).

The art of Vasudeo S. Gaitonde (1924-2001) was recently the focus of a prestigious retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Gaitonde attended the Sir. J.J. School of Art in Bombay, where he met Syed Haider Raza and other important Indian Modernist artists, and from which he graduated in 1948. Following a Rockefeller fellowship in New York in 1964, the artist began experimenting with different methods of applying paint. Using the paint roller and the palette knife, Gaitonde transformed the process of painting into an act of art. Consistent with the philosophies of Conceptual Art, which he experienced while in New York, Gaitonde privileged introspection and art as an idea over representation and form. “I work as an individual. I do not have a scientific point of view; it is mostly my total experience of life [and] nature that comes through me, that is manifested on canvas. For me every painting is a miracle.” The present painting is dated 1970 and is a richly contemplative work that has remained in the same collection since its purchase in 1971, now coming to auction for the first time (estimate: £600,000-800,000 / $945,000-1,260,000).

Tyeb Mehta (1925-2009), one of India’s most revered Modern artists, painted Untitled (Blue Bird) only two years before his death. This features a blue bird hurtling out of control, which is suspended in time and space. Existing in an eternal present, the image of the bird locks its viewers into a vertiginous relationship, inviting them to engage with the unceasing fall. Mehta builds dynamic tension through the contortion of the subject’s body, and the diagonal line that splits the field of vision in two. The subjects of Mehta’s works fluctuate between states – fixed yet in motion, mythic yet modern, animal yet human. The falling figure takes the form of a bird, a symbol of our fallibility and fragility, yet also our eternal resilience (estimate: £600,000 – £800,000 /$945,000 - $1,260,000).

Painted by Syed Haider Raza (B. 1922), one of the founders of the Progressive Artists’ Group, is Haute Provenance painted in 1961. The painting comes from a private American collector, whose family acquired it from a gallery in Palo Alto, California in the early 1960s (estimate: £280,000-400,000/$440,000-630,000).

Raza’s animated Haute Provence exemplifies his capacity to create form through colour. The abstract village-scape cuts a jagged zigzag across the surface of the canvas. Raza implies architectural forms through the use of key signposts; the upside-down v’s connote gabled roofing, soaring slender cylinders connote chimneys, and alternating fields of colour suggest walls. Consequently, the village is conveyed to its viewer in temporal increments. It requires its viewers to stand before it, to let the colours flicker across the canvas and the shapes to collide and intersect, until the provincial scene reveals itself as the subject.

Over five decades Rameshwar Broota’s (B. 1941) oeuvre has investigated, interrogated and experimented with one key existential subject: Man. Drawn to fundamental questions of existence and morality from a young age, Broota began a life-long quest to understand and communicate man’s moral and physical place in the world. Man (14th) was executed in 1983 (estimate: £100,000-150,000/$157,000-236,000) during which period the artist introduced a ridged grid schema into his paintings as a forensic tool for examining the anatomical structure of man. The artist was the recent focus of a prestigious retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi earlier this year.

Atul Dodiya’s (B. 1964) allegorical collage Measles: Kiefer's Cell fuses fragments of art historical masterpieces with iconographies from Pop Culture, current events and his own autobiography (estimate: £50,00070,000 / $76,000-110,000). Deeply sensitive to history, Dodiya created works that reflect his breadth of knowledge of current events and ancient religions, and he quotes freely from both Western and Indian art traditions. Capitalising on the Post-Modern tendency of ironic juxtaposition, Dodiya includes the vocabulary of Western contemporary art as seen in this painting from the series German Measles, which references the monumental paintings of 1930s interiors created by the renowned Post-War German artist Anselm Keifer. Atul Dodiya comments, “One side references a sculpture and painting by Keifer and on the right is an Indian man in prisoner’s clothes. Keifer never liked to be photographed until much later in his career and I like the ambiguity of who this man may be. It looks partly like me, partly like Ambedkar perhaps, and partly like how I imagined Kiefer.”

Bharti Kher was born in England in 1969, emigrating to New Delhi in the early 1990s. As an expatriate, she examines Indian culture from the 'outside looking in,' commenting on class, mass culture and everyday life. Kher began working with bindis in 1995 and recontextualises this mundane yet culturally-charged object, a dot commonly worn on the forehead by Indian women, associated with marital rites, religious and cultural practice. By appropriating this image for the creation of an artwork, Kher comments on the mechanisation and commercialisation of an item also viewed as deeply traditional. Kher creates this paradoxical Peacock from a multiplicity of bindis, a symbol of tradition, modesty and spirituality. In projecting the bindi onto such a scale, Kher aggrandises questions of identity, gender and race in globalising India. This work was part of a private Spanish art collection and will be offered with an estimate of £50,000-70,000 / $76,000-110,000.