South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art

Sale Overview

Christie’s annual autumn auction of South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art will be held on 18 September during Asian Art Week in New York. This season, our catalogue celebrates the artists who helped define modern South Asian art in the 20th century as well as the wide array of artistic practices and styles that followed in their wake, in South Asia and its diaspora.

2024 marks the birth centenaries of the artists Francis Newton Souza and Ram Kumar, whom we have the honor of celebrating this September through a selection of masterpieces from private collections around the world. These include Souza’s monumental Resurrected Christ and early Still Life with Relics, and a collection of dynamic early works by Ram Kumar that have never been seen before — shedding new light on the development of the artist’s oeuvre. In addition to this strong selection of works by Souza and Kumar, we are pleased to present important paintings by Akbar Padamsee, Jehangir Sabavala, Sayed Haider Raza, Maqbool Fida Husain, Jagdish Swaminathan and Bikash Bhattacharjee, sculptures by Meera Mukherjee and K.G. Subramanyan, and works on paper by Tyeb Mehta, Manjit Bawa and Ganesh Haloi among others. Complementing these works by the modern masters are a group of lots by early pioneers of modernism in South Asia including Gaganendranath and Abanindranath Tagore, Nicholas Roerich, Jamini Roy, George Keyt and Mohammad Kibria.

Auction times

18 Sep 10:00 AM (EDT) Lots 601-708

Our specialist’s selection

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.