12th September,2001

Indian Artists to Create Works at Exhibit

By MICHEL W. POTTS
Special to India-West
LOS ANGELES -- Famed artist Francis Newton Souza and 'Sotheby Artist of the Year' nominee Baiju Parthan will appear in person during the two week-long "Indian Contemporary Fine Art" exhibition set for Sept. 9-21 at the Seven Degrees art gallery in Laguna Beach.

Presented by Saffron Art in association with the Chennai-based Apparao Galleries, the exhibition will feature 160 paintings ranging in price from $600 to $3500 that have been created by 24 of India's more renowned artists as well as those who are slowly gaining recognition in the Indian art world.

In addition to Souza and Parthan, the works of renowned Indian artist M.F. Husain will appear alongside those created by Shibu Natesan, Jitish Kallat, C.K. Bose, Sujata Bajaj, Arpita Singh and S.H. Raza, to name only a few.

The exhibition was brought to Southern California because "the timing for Indian art is now," Minal Vazirani, who heads Saffron Art along with her husband Dinesh, told India-West. "It's been sorely undervalued for several years, and it's just coming into its own in auction houses."

Not only has "there been a fair amount of resources allocated towards developing Indian art internationally," she added, "but museums are beginning to purchase and display Indian contemporary art as opposed to Indian antiquities."

During the exhibition, both Souza and Parthan will be on the gallery premises creating new paintings that will then be added to the exhibition's line-up, "and it's a fantastic opportunity to actually see them at work, since it is not often that people like us are let in to see what an artist is doing in his or her studio," Minal Vazirani said.

For art enthusiasts and those wishing to know more about Indian contemporary art, the exhibit also plans to have on hand copies of Yashodhara Dalmai's seminal work, "The Making of Indian Modern Art."

Neither Minal Vazirani nor her husband had originally set out to become connoisseurs of the Indian art world. Minal graduated from UCLA in 1993 with a degree in chemical engineering and minored in art history.

"It's a bizarre combination," she admitted to India-West, "but Dinesh's is even more bizarre, because he was an art design undergrad while he was studying industrial engineering for his master's degree when he was at Stanford."

Shortly after they married in 1995, the two moved back to India, Dinesh becoming involved in the family business, Minal working as a consultant for Accenture, a management consulting firm in Mumbai.

During their free time on the weekends, they toured India's art galleries over a six-year period, slowly and steadily building up a relationship with art dealers, gallery owners and many of the country's leading as well as upcoming artists.

After having acquired a fair number of paintings themselves, the couple decided to set up Saffron Art and pitched it to gallery owners and dealers as "a vehicle that would allow them to reach out to an international customer base," Minal recounted.

Furthermore, Saffron Art would "put them in a position to develop a greater awareness of Indian contemporary art and really create a stronger cultural link with many institutions and museums around the world that would be able to feed back into India and provide greater opportunities for many of the artists and their creative works," she said.

Saffron Art became a division of their umbrella company, Planet Saffron. Based in Mumbai, with an auxiliary office in Anaheim. the company was up and running in January 2000, "and it started growing much faster than we expected, so Dinesh took a sabbatical and is working full-time with me," Minal said. "Pretty soon, we were at 40 people and we're in the process of conducting sales all over the world."

In addition to Saffron Art, the Planet Saffron company is also home to Saffron Style, a division devoted mostly to fashions, home furnishings and collectibles, "and is very much life-style oriented," Minal said.

Saffron Soul is yet a third division of the company which markets worldwide Ayurveda, yoga and massage.

The works of as many as 500 Indian artists can currently be found on the Saffron Art Web site, and an online auction was held in November of last year. The next online auction will take place in the first week of December.

In addition to selling art online, the couple have recently begun mounting exhibitions, the first one held last March in Hong Kong, followed by an even larger exhibition in New York in May.

Further details about the exhibition can be obtained at www.saffronart.com.

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