A Roaring Start
The 2018 spring sales, taking place in the final weeks of March across New York, Dubai and Hong Kong, saw record-breaking auction results and high sell-through rates. This positive start to the year exceeded all expectations, especially as stock markets around the world tanked, indicating that the art market might actually exist in a parallel universe.
New York’s Asia Week kicked off with a sale of modern and contemporary South Asian art at Sotheby’s on March 19, which featured masterworks from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The 72-lot sale achieved a total of USD 2.8 million, and was led by Raja Ravi Varma’s (circa 1896)—depicting a seminude female figure with reference to a mythological nymph—which fetched USD 795,000, above its high estimate of USD 600,000. As one of the first Indian painters to employ a European realist style, and whose works are seldom offered at auction, Varma remains in high demand; in Sotheby’s 2017 sale of South Asian modern and contemporary art, Varma’s , also featuring women as, a painting by Rameshwar Broota from the “Unknown Soldier” series, created in 2000, which utilizes his signature scraping technique to realize the depiction of a man wearing a hard hat. The work sold for USD 175,000, nearly double the high estimate of USD 90,000.
