Raza Bindu painting leads Islamic and Indian Arts sale

The recent Antiquities, Islamic and Indian Arts sale at London auctioneers Roseberys saw sales surpass the £1-million mark.

The auction house reported how buyers from across the globe competed in all three areas of the sale. The auction house’s Islamic and Indian Arts Department also put their mark on the Indian contemporary scene with an impressive S.H. Raza (1922-2016) Bindu work from 1995. The Bindu acrylic on canvas by the Indian painter smashed its pre-sale estimate of £50,000-70,000 to achieve an impressive £312,000 (including buyers premium).

The sale is the second highest result for a Bindu painting ever to appear on the market and the highest outside of India. The result was fuelled by the interest in Raza with the largest ever retrospective of the artist at the Pompidou Centre in Paris running until May 2023. The 90-work exhibition is the culmination of a spate of shows in India that took place in 2022, the centenary year of Raza’s birth, in three Indian private museums: the Piramal Museum of Art and the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, both in Mumbai, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi.

Rosebery’s said that fierce bidding on the telephone from bidders across the globe was fuelled by the attractive estimate and recognition of the artist’s increased importance in the history of modern art.