South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art

Sale Overview

This spring, Christie’s auction of South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art will take place on 25 March during Asian Art Week in New York. This season’s catalogue brings to the market several important works that have not been seen in public for several decades, celebrating the rich diversity of artistic approaches that have emerged from South Asia and its global diaspora across the 20th and 21st centuries.

Led by Tyeb Mehta’s 1977 masterpiece Gesture, the auction brings together an exceptional group of modern works, including an impressive set of paintings from the 1950s by Sayed Haider Raza, an important early painting by Maqbool Fida Husain titled Puppet Dancers, and Jehangir Sabavala’s 1959 Butterflies over Pink Blossoms and 1970 Green Thoughts in a Green Shade. These works are complemented by an extremely rare, large-format canvas by K. Ramanujam, alongside a seminal collection of early works by Ganesh Pyne, including Crossing the Fountain (1974), and striking paintings by Francis Newton Souza, Ram Kumar, K. K. Hebbar, Jagdish Swaminathan, Prabhakar Barwe, Manjit Bawa and Avinash Chandra among others.

The catalogue also features works by significant forerunners of this group, including Edwin Lord Weeks, Pestonji Bomanji, J. P. Gangooly, Jamini Roy, George Keyt and Richard Gabriel, and is rounded out by notable contemporary works by Sheila Makhijani, Jitish Kallat and Senaka Senanayake.

The live auction will be accompanied by an online sale running from 18 March – 1 April 2025.

Auction times

25 Mar 10:00 AM (EDT)

Brought to you by

Nishad Avari

Specialist, Head of Department | South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art

Nishad Avari is Specialist, Head of Department for South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art at Christie’s New York. Mr. Avari joined the South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art Department at Christie’s as an Associate Specialist in 2013, with more than eight years of auction experience in New York and Mumbai. In addition to his previous role as Associate Vice President and Specialist in Modern and Contemporary Indian Art at Saffronart, Mr. Avari also served as Editor, handling cataloguing, research and content for the auction house. Prior to joining the auction world, Mr. Avari worked with the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, during the seminal international exhibition, Picasso: Metamorphoses 1900–1972. Since graduating from Macalester College, Minnesota with a dual degree in Political Science and International Studies, Mr. Avari has contributed articles and essays to exhibition catalogues, scholarly journals and news publications. In 2017, Mr. Avari relocated to New York head Christie’s auctions of South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art there.

Raagini Pareek

Cataloguer | South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art

Raagini Pareek is a Cataloguer with the South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art department in New York. After graduating from New York University with a BA in psychology and minors in art history and economics, she joined the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF) in Mumbai as an intern working with their modern and contemporary Indian art collection. During her time at the JNAF, Raagini worked on two exhibitions, the modern S.H. Raza: Zamin and the contemporary Woman Is As Woman Does. Following this, she went on to hold a curatorial internship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the Department of Asian Art, where she researched ancient Buddhist Art and assisted with the 2023 exhibition “Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE-400BCE”. Now, in her role as a cataloguer at Christie’s, Raagini has returned to South Asian modern and contemporary art, and is responsible for researching and cataloguing all the works of art that come through the department.

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