Linke - Artinfo

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Below: knma’s 2012
exhibition “Crossings:
Time Unfolded II”
included Ravinder
Reddy’s Woman
Braiding Her Hair,
2008, a nude figure in
gilded and painted
polyester resin fiberglass,
left foreground,
and Rina Banerjee’s
The World as Burnt
Fruit, 2009, right
foreground, a monumental
mixed-
media floor piece.
Opposite: Ranbir
kaleka’s Crossings,
2005, top, a video
projection on painting
with audio, and
Syed Haider Raza’s
Saurashtra, 1983,
the acrylic on canvas
painting for which
nadar paid a record
$3.5 million, confirming
her commitment
to bring important
art back to India.
piece. “Overwhelmed,” as she describes it, by the work’s
“awe-inspiring” nature, she decided on the spot to acquire
it for knma, India’s first private museum for modern and
contemporary art. “It is one of the most phenomenal
works any artist could have done. I had to have it,” Nadar
said with conviction when asked if she had considered
the logistical challenge that transporting and installing
such a gargantuan work would present. Shipped to India
in four containers, the 15-section sculpture was assembled
over seven days by the team that had set it up at Tate
Britain. The ceiling of the mall’s basement was reinforced
to bear the colossal load, and a nearby shop front had
to be dismantled to make way for the three cranes required
for the sculpture’s assembly. Nadar remains mum about
the amount she paid Hauser & Wirth, the gallery that
represents Gupta internationally. “It wasn’t cheap,” is
all she has been willing to share.
One outcome of this spectacular purchase is the
emergence of Line of Control as a visual magnet to lure
mall-goers who might otherwise not visit the museum,
where admission is free. “We hope that the viewership of
Subodh’s piece will bring more traction for the museum,”
Nadar explained at the press conference marking the
unveiling of Line of Control. Although Gupta’s work
has won critical accolades and collector support on the
international art circuit, his intricate assemblages had never
been presented to a popular audience in India. For Gupta,
who was present at the press conference, the thrill lay in
having the work—whose shape alludes to the potentially
deadly tension along the India-Pakistan border—displayed
in his native country. “An artist couldn’t be prouder to
have his work come home,” he said.
A comparable commitment to home and heritage
motivates Nadar, and a key mission of knma is to bring
significant art by Indian modernists back to India so the
full range of the country’s art history can be viewed and
appreciated. In 2010, for example, she paid a recordbreaking
$3.5 million at Christie’s London for Saurashtra,
a 1983 painting by Syed Haider Raza. The artist was a
central figure in the Bombay-based Progressive Artists
Group, which was established in 1947 and included
Maqbool Fida Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee,
and Francis Newton Souza. Discouraged by the lack of a
thriving art scene and the dearth of indigenous collectors,
Raza, like many of his contemporaries, moved abroad.
He lived in Paris for six decades before returning to New
Delhi in 2011. Saurashtra came from the French collector
who had bought the work directly from Raza. A large,
square canvas featuring geometrically arranged blocks
of reds and oranges and the bindu motif, symbolizing
spiritual consciousness, Saurashtra was Nadar’s most
famous acquisition prior to Line of Control and was
displayed prominently on one of the four red walls that
framed a section of knma’s 2012 show “Crossings: Time
Unfolded II.” That show also included Souza’s electrifying
The Red Road, a 1962 landscape whose palette and
March/april 2013 | BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA
this page and opposite: KnMa
coarse texture are influenced by laterite, the rust-red soil
of his birthplace, Goa, a coastal state south of Mumbai.
Nadar’s pursuit of art isn’t limited to acquiring
high-priced, high-profile works abroad, though several
Indian art critics have grumbled, especially after she paid
£993,250 ($1.5 million) at Sotheby’s London in 2010 for
Bharti Kher’s The Skin Speaks a Language Not Its Own,
2006, a life-size fiberglass elephant with Kher’s trademark
bindis affixed across its surface. Her collecting is part of
a larger philanthropic vision she shares with her husband,
Shiv Nadar, who founded a technology start-up in 1976
that has grown into the global behemoth HCL Enterprises.
She began to acquire art in the late 1980s with the simple
aim of decorating her walls. “I started collecting for our
home, which we were building at the time. There was no
thought of a museum,” she explains. “I commissioned
art from Husain and bought works by Manjit Bawa and
Rameshwar Broota; all three pieces are still in the house.”
Nadar’s acquisitions budget—and her vision—grew
with her husband’s success. The two met when Nadar
was working for an advertising agency, and they soon
became bridge partners. (She continues to play competitive
bridge and has represented India in international
tournaments.) HCL was flourishing, and Nadar, not
content with being the idle wife of an entrepreneur,
became instrumental in the company’s philanthropic
and educational initiatives, which include the Shiv Nadar
Foundation, established in 1996, and Shiv Nadar
University, which had its first graduating class in 2011. She
was on Forbes Asia magazine’s 48 Heroes of Philanthropy
list in 2010; her husband followed one year later.
By 2005 the Nadar home could no longer accommodate
the collection, which had steadily grown, its focus no
longer confined to Indian Progressive artists but expanded
to embrace contemporary Indian lights like Atul Dodiya,
Rina Banerjee, Ranbir Kaleka, and Anish Kapoor. “At
some point I had a lot more art than I had wall space,
and I had to decide whether to stop collecting or to keep
putting works in storage,” Nadar says. “Keeping them
in storage didn’t seem like a very wise thing, so I decided
to do something more meaningful and set up a museum.
And after I first had the thought, in 2006, it took me two
or three years to plan it and get down to it.”
“In late 2009 Mrs. Nadar and I started looking at
all she had acquired since the late 1980s, so that the
first step—to put the inventory in place—could begin,”
recalls Roobina Karode, director and chief curator of the
museum. knma opened in 2010, first in a location on
the vast HCL campus in Noida. The inaugural exhibition,
BlouinArtinfo.comAsiA | march/april 2013
“building an
iconic structure
is as important
for a museum
as the art
it houses.”
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